Performing Identity / Crossing Borders

Performing Identity / Crossing Borders
Cyprus, May 3 – 6, 2007
Presentations: Drafts and Notes for Pre-Symposium Review
1
Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis
"Desiring," or Simply Human: Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body
14
Kristina Aurylaite
"I must be different when I am out there" (B)order in First Nations Canadian Lee
Maracle's Novel Ravensong
24
Isil Egrikavuk & Georgia Kotretsos
Re-thinking Artists-in-Transit
34
Núria Casado Gual
"Finding Another Face Inside My Face": the Semiotics of Mime in Edgar Nkosi White's
Racialized Dramaturgies
46
Jonathan Hall
Writing Citizens: Teaching Writing and Performing Citizenship in Lebanon
69
Wojciech Kalaga
The Third of the Body
88
Frances Kruk
With a Carving Knife: Unearthing the Feminine
97
Marie-Claude Legault
"Quiet Revolution": Michel Tremblay`s Reinterpretation of the Frontier between the
Francophone East and the Anglophone West of Montreal in Some Night My Prince Will
Come
106
Marc Müller
“The compass creates the hand”: On Inter-Relations of Self, Words and Places, and InterCultural Poetry by José F. A. Oliver
113
Mervyn Nicholson
Fast Forward Nation
117
Sondra Sainsbury
The Silent Presence: Asian Female Domestic Workers and Cyprus in the new Europe
122
Slavica Srbinovska
Hermeneutic approach to the concepts of identity, power and their commitment in the
discourse of contemporary philosophy
132
Smaro Kamboureli
Memory under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze
147
Petra Tournay-Theodotou
Strange Encounters: Nationhood and the Stranger in Caryl Phillips's A Distant
Shore
157
Tomi Adeaga
Africans, Immigrants, and the Question of Identity in Germany
164
Aruna Srivastava, Proma Tagore, Lisha Hassanali, and Sharanpal Ruprai
Desi-Grrls: South Asian Bodies in Performance
164
167
169
179
The Road to Nicosia: Fragments, Quotations, Potholes
NOT OUR MOTHER’S CHOLI: Film, Identity and Transforming Borders
Migrancy, Remixed: Bodies Beside(s) Themselves
Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso
Crossing Borders to Perform Identity in Jackie Kay's Trumpet
Not(unpaginated)
submitted
187
Larissa Lai
Good-bye Butterfly, Hello Kitty: Travelling Blossoms in Performance
[presentation currently unavailable]
“Desiring,” or Simply Human: Jeanette Winterson’s
Written on the Body
PI/CB
1
Jeanette Winterson is a novelist who has conspicuously defied traditional
literary standards in her work in the past twenty years and yet critics are constantly
tempted to define her against such standards1. A white male conservative or a lesbian, a
mid-stream or a feminist critic, each one tries to see a program in what she writes or,
most often, the glaring lack of it. The obvious infatuation with language and stylistics
is what makes Winterson a demanding author and, equally, a difficult one to stomach
in critical terms, especially if one is on the look out for programs and manifestos. Such
misplaced criticism could be read in the words of a book critic in the Sunday Times, for
example, who sees in Winterson “a propensity for scrawling the graffiti of gender-spite
across her pages.” (Kemp 1994: 1) The blame here is on the direct, honest depiction of
lesbian relationships where the males are dispensable or non-existent. Conversely, a
criticism that Winterson somehow fails to promote well enough the gay cause could be
found in the comments of a critic like Patricia Duncker who writes about Written on
the Body in particular that it is “a text full of lost opportunities. Winterson refuses to
write an ‘out’ lesbian novel.” (1998: 85)
If today, in the context of modern British literature, the author of Harry Potter
has blown out of proportion our common understanding of the concept of celebrity,
Winterson undoubtedly follows in the steps of writers like D. H. Lawrence, Oscar
Wilde, and Virginia Woolf who have embodied the notion of notoriety among writers.
Outspokenly gay, yet never capitalizing on the fact, she simply is. As Winterson
claims, “I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to
write,” and this is something one has to accept before approaching her novels and
essays in order to appreciate them in their own right. (1995: 04) The emphasis that
Winterson places here could be read from the point of view of what the novelist
considers her first duty: this is the duty to language, style and expression, not the duty
to produce easily consumable philosophy, be it feminist, lesbian or any other. In
response to the numerous attacks that her books are merely monuments to man-hatred
or to lesbian love, that sex and gender function as props rather than as corner stones of
narration, Winterson replies straightforwardly that nowadays the issue of gender is
actually playing a lesser role in her life as a writer and an individual. That is why in
an interview she answers honestly, “I see it as less important as I get older. I no longer
care whether somebody’s male or female. I just don’t care.” (qtd in Bilger 1997: 102)
1
I refer here to standards of narration and experimentation with the point of view and characters, for
example, as understood by narrative theory. Surely, much of what we consider “postmodern fiction”
relies exactly on such breaking up with tradition, but many examples can be found also in earlier
literature, from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the
Fury (1929).
1
Since the publication of her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985),
which won the prestigious Whitbread Award for a first novel, Winterson has
embarked on a journey of exploration, not of exploitation, of the resources of fiction.
Although most critics have readily acclaimed the new sexual politics at work in this
particular book, very few have dwelt on “the way that language plays a constitutive
role in the construction of the narrator’s sexual subjectivity,” as Finney points out.
(2000: 1) This, however, is a serious drawback, since every subsequent novel of
Winterson shows a deeper and more sophisticated engagement with language rather
than with narration or gender politics.
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Her next three novels, Boating for Beginners (1985), The Passion (1987) and
Sexing the Cherry (1989) already re-define the relationship between writer, narrator,
and language. Her next novel, Written on the Body (1992), straightforwardly engages
the reader in a dialogue on the value of language and the issue of identity, as well as
leads us towards a meditation on the vicissitudes of love and their most often clichéd
representations in literature. Here Winterson openly breaks up with one of the sacred
words in the craft of fiction, “plot,” to denounce what she sees as its self-serving
purpose. She writes, therefore, “I realized that […] plot was meaningless to me. […] I
had to accept that my love-affair was with language, and only incidentally with
narrative.” (1995: 155) In this sense, Written on the Body reads more like a stylized
exploration of language which only partially employs plot as an element of the story
and binds narration to the service of language rather than vice versa.
Winterson chooses purposefully to play with narrative instability: in Written
on the Body this is the instability of using an ungendered narrator and, therefore,
refusing the reader the comfort of “knowing” the character. As she says about the
book,
All my work is experimental in that it plays with form, refuses a traditional
narrative line, and includes the reader as a player. By that I mean that the
reader has to work with the book. In the case of Written on the Body, the
narrator has no name, is assigned no gender, is age unspecified, and highly
unreliable. I wanted to see how much information I could leave out –
especially the kind of character information that is routine – and still hold a
story together. (http://jeanettewinterson.com...)
Left without any secure directions from the author and thus accepting the role
of a “player,” the reader is forced to acknowledge that what drives the novel is not the
male/female identity of the characters, but rather language itself: language which
demands precision of expression in what seems an intimate research on a well-known
subject, the subject of love. As a player, then, the reader can only collaborate in
deciphering the nature of love through language which at the same time bends the
boundaries of clichés and invents a new expression for this perennial subject.
The issue of the lesbian relationship, as attractive as it might be for analysis,
appears only as a background in the novel rather than as its center. In this sense, I
would agree with Finney who argues that Written on the Body
2
[…] focuses on the power of language to create both subjectivity and
sexuality, and that to concentrate exclusively on the politics of the lesbian
subject blinds reviewer and critic alike to the preoccupations and very real
distinction of this novel. (2000: 1)
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3
The interesting question, in my view, is how the Unconscious and language
create subjectivity and sexuality through the workings of drive, symptom, and love,
not simply what gender roles the characters in the novel choose to perform. I will very
briefly touch upon the issue of sex and gender, then, not because there is no point to
engage in a feminist reading of the novel, but because, personally, I also find the sex
and gender issues to be supplementary to the analysis of Written on the Body. In other
words, while critics readily analyze the novel as “lesbian” and, therefore, as yet
another off-spring of gender politics, the shift of attention to language and the
Unconscious can lead us to focus on the individual psyche and the construction of
subjectivity. A psychoanalytic reading can help in the interpretation of the forces that
shape the subjectivity of the undeniably complex narrator in the book, and these
forces, first of all, are psychic, and “gay” or “lesbian,” or “heterosexual” only in the
second place.
We can hardly deny, of course, that gendering, or gender-choice, is normative
and subject-formative, and as Butler argues in Bodies That Matter, that it allows for
the “appropriation of the speaking ‘I.’” (1993: 3) The ‘I,’ though, is a linguistic shifter
which evades gendering per se. Gendering for the subject, however, is only possible
through the initiation into the Symbolic order2 which is done in language and through
the agency of already gendered subjects (a “father” and a “mother” in the traditional
case). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex and the advent into language is what
initially sparks for the subject the process of gendering proper so that a position, or a
role, is chosen. Butler further describes how the gendering of the subject produces at
the same time “a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who
form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.” (1993: 3) She argues also
that such a domain is one of necessary exclusion: that it is a “site of dreaded
identification against which, and by virtue of which, the domain of the subject will
circumscribe its own claims to autonomy and life.” (1993: 3)
Read from this perspective, the narrator in Written on the Body belongs to the
“abject domain” because of its ungendered identity. In this case Stevens’ argument,
for example, is that, even for communicative purposes, the possibility of an
ungendered person is problematic, for she claims in an article,
I am forced to use “s/he” or “him/her” since calling the narrator “it,”
reinforces the idea that such a person could not exist as a subject, but only as
an abject, unlivable body. However, using “s/he” and “him/her” also seems
to be inappropriate since they too reinforce, through language, the binary
understanding of gender. The narrator is not part “she,” part “he,” but
rather is something other, which perhaps could be described as the slash
2
“Symbolic order” here refers to the famous Lacanian concept.
3
between “she” and “he” rather than as the words on either side.
(www.ags.uci.edu)
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4
While I acknowledge the obvious difficulty in choosing an appropriate
pronoun for a correct reference, I cannot agree that using a slash to convey the
“otherness” of the narrator will be a way out of the situation. Just on the contrary: in
my mind, if one accepts like Stevens that the narrator stands for “otherness,” and
hence belongs to the abject domain, it will mean that to accept that choice of gender –
in this case the narrator choosing a gay identity – is an act of self-abjection. It seems
to me that what Butler refers to has to do with the subject’s perception of an other as
“abject,” not that the “abject” exists and, therefore, needs a name to be found between
the slash in he/she. For the purpose of naming, I will choose to refer to the narrator in
Written on the Body singularly as “she” and “her” for two reasons. First, I consider
that there is no quality of “otherness” that a priori positions the narrator outside of
some ideal world of heterosexual subjects, and second, that the pronoun “she” already
bears in itself the idea of differentiation compared to the generalized use of “man” and
“he” to stand for mankind. In this sense, using a “she” does not aim at emphasizing
the lesbian nature of the relationships: as a matter of fact, there are at least two
examples in the novel of the narrator’s choosing men (Crazy Frank and Carlo) as
sexual partners, while still mostly interested in women. Even if we choose the term
“bisexual” to describe the narrator, it will only refer to the actual practice of sex
without reference to her complex relationship with language or to her self-realization
as a subject.
It seems to me that one of the premises from which Winterson writes can be
connected to what Derrida once playfully called “sexual otherwise,” namely the
position that, “[…] there would be no more sexes, there would be one sex for each
time.” (1987: 199) If we agree with Derrida, then, it means that what Winterson
achieves in Written on the Body is not simply to dispense altogether with the notion of
a gendered narrator, but to displace gender from the idea of stability and sexual
identity, and to create a picture of sexuality as fluid and multiple, as something which
“literally breaks in from the outside… reaches the subject from the other.”
(Laplanche, Pontalis 1968: 10) The sexual choices of the narrator is not what makes
ultimately Written on the Body an intriguing novel, but the ways in which she tells the
story of these choices and makes the language of love as if almost tangible.
“Love found, love lost, love found again – maybe.”
If in his work Freud constantly revisits the problems of the Unconscious,
human sexuality, and love being aware of the intricate relations between them,
Written on the Body fictionally dramatizes these relations through the search for love
and the fear of losing the love object. In this novel anxiety functions as a point of
frustration for a narrator who has to solve one too many riddles: the riddles of love
and individual desire, of life and death, and of mourning the ultimate loss of a love
object. Winterson very successfully balances the representation of the search for love
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with the meditation on the nature of love. The language to express this search makes
the novel a philosophic contemplation rather than a picaresque novel of exploration
and love conquest. The search for love in Written on the Body is not the quest that
romantic literature exploits, yet Winterson, on the other hand, is not interested in a
strictly realistic narration either: she remains in the middle of a discourse on love that
problematizes the way one perceives, thinks, and speaks about it in a world of dreams
and in reality.
How is the search for love managed, then, in the novel and in Freudian theory?
As Freud writes in his paper “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912),
If someone’s need for love is not entirely satisfied by reality, he is bound to
approach every new person whom he meets with libidinal anticipatory ideas;
and it is highly probable that both portions of his libido, the portion that is
capable of becoming conscious as well as the unconscious one, have a share in
forming that attitude. (1912: 100)
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Here Freud makes an observation that once again undeniably connects the
Unconscious to the need for love: what the subject does not know is that the search
for a loved one is only partially an act of will and that there is something unknowable
that drives her along. Despite the effort of the conscious to channel the search for love
into what is reasonable and advisable, the unconscious portion of the libido responds
to something that irresponsibly leads the subject to find love in most unlikely objects.
Thus, as Freud points out, “Originally we knew only sexual objects; and
psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or
respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious.” (1912: 105) So, it could be
a man, it could be a woman, it could be anyone that stirs the phantasy-world of the
subject and responds to the need dictated by the libido.
Since the overall meaning will hardly be obscured, I will continue using the
term “drive” in the analysis of Written on the Body, although the obvious reference
will be to the specific “drive derivatives” of the characters in the novel. What Freud
was arguing over and over again in his papers, namely that the sexual drive is one of
the keys in deciphering human behavior, Winterson manages to convey the same idea
in a novel about the precariousness of love and the need of the subject to confront this
fact. The sexual drive that dictates the search for satisfaction for the narrator is only
one side of her greater quest for self-realization through love. In her own descriptions
the narrator in Written on the Body is a searching spirit who is not afraid of
experimentations with lovers and love, or... of getting burned in the process. As she
says, “I had been an emotional nomad for too long,”3 so that after an array of women
(and men), the narrator finally finds the beloved one which is not just a sexual partner,
but someone who responds to her psychic needs to possess and be possessed by the
love object.
3
Winterson, J. Written on the Body. London: Vintage, 1993, p. 38. Further references in the text will be
to this edition and will be given only with page number in parenthesis.
5
The quest for the beloved one passes through a series of relationships of
questionable success. The narrator honestly tells the stories of the many failed
relationships that hardly teach her a lesson – for what is there to learn but that one
needs to carry on the quest for love? Those relationships definitely leave a deep mark
in her memory and also reinvent for the reader the notion of a romantic setting
cherished by the traditional understanding of love: for example, the relationship with
Inge, the Dutch anarcha-feminist whose strategy is to blow up urinals in Paris as the
symbols of patriarchy. Or with the Botanical Gardens keeper, Judith, who locks her
out of the greenhouse in the middle of winter, naked after a sexual escapade, and then
burns her clothes. Or having sex with the unnamed girlfriend always in the open, until
one day “back at the doctor’s for the fifth time having a thistle removed,” he tells her,
“You know, love is a beautiful thing but there are clinics for people like you.” (20)
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The humorous tone that the narrator uses at times and the somewhat selfdeprecating stand are merely a cover up for the more complex attitude towards the
psychic need for self-exploration through love. For example, very early in the novel,
she even acknowledges, “I can tell by now you are wondering whether I can be
trusted as a narrator.” (24) First, there is an obvious narcissistic indulgence for her in
the possession of what she has wrongfully considered a “love object” in the different
relationships before Louise, the one and only true beloved. Thus, in Freudian terms,
love has a purely narcissistic origin since
Love is derived from the capacity of the ego to satisfy some of its instinctual
impulses auto-erotically by obtaining organ-pleasure. It is originally
narcissistic, then passes over on to objects, which have been incorporated into
the extended ego, and expresses the motor efforts of the ego towards these
objects as sources of pleasure. It becomes intimately linked with the activity of
the later sexual instincts and, when these have been completely synthesized,
coincides with the sexual impulsion as a whole. (1915a: 138)
For the narrator in Written on the Body every one of these failed relationships
is marked by covert narcissism, even if she is an altogether generous lover. The issue
for her has to do with the reality of taking and to a lesser extent with giving, so that a
sort of parasitic status quo is established between her and every temporary partner she
gets for a while. So she admits,
I’m addicted to the first six months. It’s the midnight calls, the bursts of
energy, the beloved as battery for all those fading cells. I told myself after the
last whipping with Bathsheba that I wouldn’t do any of it again. I did suspect
that I might like being whipped, if so, I had at least to learn to wear an extra
overcoat. (76)
Temporally set, the stretch of happiness seems to be about six months long or
so. Maybe only the heart-breaking fallout with Bathsheba, her happily-married dentist
and lover, breaks the rule, although she feels throughout this three-year “after work,
five to seven” relationship that “We sank lower and lower in our love-lined lead-lined
coffin.” (16) Unable to share with Bathsheba anything but the bed in a few stolen
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hours, arguing with her about what is reasonable and what is not, and feeling guilty
for hiding the truth from friends, the narrator is forced to accept Bathsheba’s position
that, “Telling the truth, she said, was a luxury we could not afford and so lying
became a virtue, an economy we had to practise.” (16) And thus the story painfully
goes on until the moment when the narrator gives the ultimatum to be expected in
such situation: Bathsheba has to choose between her lover and her husband, which she
does by going on a six-week trip to South Africa with the husband. After their return
Bathsheba admits that she might have contracted a venereal disease from her husband
who has contracted it during one of his business trips, but she has just forgotten to tell
her lover about it. For the narrator the betrayal is not simply commensurate with the
danger of contracting a disease, but also with Bathsheba’s choice to pretend even
more and keep what has been “the perfect public marriage” for ten-twelve years,
despite the fact that the marriage is a total sham. (45)
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The chronic inability of the narrator to nurture and keep relationships, in my
view, cannot be simply dismissed as a problem of difficult lesbian or bisexual
relationships. It seems to me that in this case she is caught in the ultimate net of
repression and production of neurotic symptoms as interpreted in psychoanalytic
terms. As Freud writes in his paper “Repression” on the connection between
repression and symptom,
Further, we know that repression leaves symptoms behind it. May we then
suppose that the forming of substitutes and the forming of symptoms coincide,
and, if this is so on the whole, is the mechanism of forming symptoms the
same as that of repression? The general probability would seem to be that the
two are widely different, and that it is not the repression itself which produces
substitutive formations and symptoms, but that these latter are indications of a
return of the repressed… (1915b: 154)
The interesting point in this statement comes, no doubt, in the end of this
passage and it is connected to an analysis of repression. To go a step back before
discussing the symptom formation, repression in the Unconscious is understood by
Freud as “primal,” i.e. the repression of the “psychical (ideational) representative of
the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious,”4 and “secondary,” where it
affects “mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought
as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it.” (1915c:
148) The symptom, as it becomes clear from the extended passage quoted above, is
not a product of repression, but an indicator that there is a “return of the repressed” at
work. The symptom, in other words, denies the logic of the conscious and is
considered something alien to it, yet it cannot be contained in the Unconscious either.
What Miller aphoristically claims, then, relates to the “accidental” format of the
symptom, that “There can be no symptom without reference to some symphony itself
disturbed by a dissonance, by an unexpected accident.” (http://www.lacan.com...)
4
Here again the term “instinct” stands for the German Trieb which, it has been argued, is better
translated in English as “drive.”
7
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For Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), the failure of
repression results in a signal that danger is threatening the conscious. A number of
inhibitions which the ego imposes on itself result in an attempt to move away from
the danger, “in order not to have to undertake fresh measures of repression – in order
to avoid a conflict with the id.” (1926: 240) One vicissitude of the drive, “the
transformation into affect,” can lead to the appearance of anxiety which serves as a
necessary prerequisite for a symptom formation and is a catalyst for its intensive
production. Thus, the ego seems to generate anxiety in order to create the power
necessary to combat the threatening impulses from the Unconscious or to flee from an
imminent danger. The symptom formation relieves the situation at least temporally by
removing the ego from the immediate danger through a substitutive formation in the
place of threatening instinctual process. For the narrator in Written on the Body, then,
the repression – of whatever initial psychic material there might be – is never
completely exercised and the production of anxiety and symptoms is fully at work.
The numerous relationships with men and women turn out to be fruitless escapades
that fuel merely a few months of passion that soon afterwards grow into a burden and
source of frustration. As she admits,
I had done to death the candles and champagne, the roses, the dawn breakfasts,
the transatlantic telephone calls and the impulsive plane rides. I had done all
of that to escape the cocoa and hot water bottles. And I had done all of that
because I thought the fiery furnace must be better than central heating. I
suppose I couldn’t admit that I was trapped in a cliché every bit as redundant
as my parents’ roses round the door. (21)
Every next lover turns to be a “symptom” of the narrator, a symptom of
returned repressed which could not be overcome by merely changing the setting.
Psychoanalytically defined, she is an obsessive neurotic at war with her own ego
which demands unconditional narcissistic love; when unsatisfied and threatened with
an inevitable loss of what has seemed temporally to be a loved object, it produces
more and more anxiety and symptoms. As Samuels reads the difference between the
hysteric and the obsessive from a Lacanian perspective,
The neurotic symptom represents a compromise solution between the two
extremes of amoral sexuality and the morality of the self. What serves to
differentiate the hysterical symptom from the obsessional symptom is that the
hysterical symptom or resolution occurs most often on the surface of the body,
while the obsessional symptom is most often an internal thought. (1993: 87)
For the narrator in Written on the Body the obsessional symptom is exercised
internally as a thought, as an obsessive return to the search for love in contemplation
and to a redefinition of the language of love. The fear that the next lover Jacqueline,
the one that she takes as a “last ditch” and a return to the world of the “simple and
ordinary,” is so overwhelming so that the “love” lasts just a few months. Despite the
illusions that “Its worth lies in the neatness. No more sprawling life for me. This is
container gardening,” this relationship also turns into a failure. (27) “Container
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gardening,” though, seems to be completely disastrous because it is not fulfilling
enough the demand of the ego to find a cherished beloved. Even the numerous
scenarios of the “normal life” of other people she creates in her mind, while
secretively observing their windows in an attempt to achieve a kind of voyeuristic
pleasure, fail to bring the desired satisfaction. The symptomatic failure and the flight
from the relationship with Jacqueline, as it turns, is yet another attempt to salvage her
ego from a potential danger of losing oneself in a pointless relationship. To use again
Lacanian vocabulary, the Other has threatened with a surplus of desire but has proven
inadequate to the demand for love of the subject.
Although after the fact the narrator in the novel asks herself, “Is there no other
way? Is happiness always a compromise?” she cannot compromise and continue the
suffocating relationship with Jacqueline. (74) The symptom in this case seems to limit
the sexual excitation onto an unexpected organ – the mind – and on one polyvalent
signifier “love.”
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The first encounter with Louise is the moment when the narrator realizes that a
fulfilling love is possible with this person and only with her. There is a very thin line
between romance and reality in the depiction of this relationship, and Winterson
purposefully plays with this distinction. By crisscrossing between the domain of
clichés about love nurtured by romance literature for centuries and the domain of
neologisms that make the language of the narrator so fascinating, the writer manages
to convey a sense of odd novelty. For example, unlike the typical romance heroine
who is usually seduced or involved into a relationship, Louise uses a trick to get to
know the narrator after seeing her earlier, and even following her to her apartment.
So, on a rainy evening, simulating a car problem that happens in front of the
narrator’s apartment, and using the “old trick” of Lady Hamilton who knew well how
to provoke Admiral Nelson’s interest, Louise meets officially the narrator. Later
Louise admits, “When I saw you two years ago I thought you were the most beautiful
creature male or female I had ever seen. […] You are a pool of clear water where the
light plays.” (84-85)
The narrator, on the other hand, constantly mixes registers and discourses –
biology, anatomy, meteorology, physics, the bible – in order to express most precisely
her complex relationship with Louise. Once it is a rather traditional description of the
beloved as a dark Gothic character, but then she has an extremely poetic comparison,
“She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of
longing.” (73) Or another ingenious way of describing the beloved which rather
breaks up with the idealization typical of the romance tradition when the narrator
admits,
If I were painting Louise I’d paint her hair as swarm of butterflies. A million
Red Admirals in a halo of movement and light. There are plenty of legends
about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into
women? Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well she does,
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it’s the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around her head. Very
often I expect her to rustle. (28-29)
These examples once again point to the fact that the obsessional symptom of
the narrator is manifested as an internal thought: one aiming at a perfect grasp of the
beloved object through the language of love, at any rate, as perfectly as possible. In
other words, the thought and the thinking process itself are sexualized, not just the
body of the subject. Hence her search for novelty and the despair that she expresses
over the necessary cliché “I love you,”
Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the
thing we long to hear? ‘I love you’ is always a quotation. You didn’t say it
first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like
savages who have found three words and worship them. (9)
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The same concern expresses Louise also by saying that “It’s the clichés that
cause the trouble,” and the same is repeated by the narrator several times. (189) It
seems as if it is not just the sexualization of thought but the overall sexualization of
language that drives the narrator into the search for the true love expression in a time
when postmodern citationality and commodification has made the language of love
“dispersed among banalities, poetry, the sacred, tragedy.” (Belsey 1994: 693)
If falling in love, as Salecl argues, is “the recognition of the narcissistic image
that forms the substance of the ideal ego,” it means that the ego searches for an ideal
and a model on the basis of which it could be seen in a different light. (1996: 187) In
other words what Salecl claims is that,
When we fall in love, we position the person who is the object of our love in
the place of the ideal ego. We love this object because of the perfection that
we have striven to reach for our own ego. (1996: 187)
Once that a love object, Louise, is found and gets in the place of the ideal ego,
what is at work in the case of the narrator in Written on the Body is a search for the
language that describes that ideal ego, for the same process turns also into a source of
authentication for the own ego. This is what she thinks about the numerous times in
previous relationships when she has used, blasphemously, the most precious cliché, “I
love you,”
You were careful not to say those words that soon became our private altar. I
had said them many times before, dropping them like coins into a wishing
well, hoping they would make me come true. […] I had given them as forgetme-nots to girls who should have known better. I have used them as bullets
and barter. (11)
It seems that this time, in the relationship with Louise, the narrator has reached
the point of saturating language with sexuality and sexuality with language. This point,
however, is not of satisfaction but still of continuous anxiety. For every moment of
reassurance and bliss is doubled into a moment of pain and frustration. The least source
of frustration seems to be the fact that Louise is also married, not happily but
10
comfortably, to a successful medical researcher. In contrast to Bathsheba who chooses
the comforts of a sham marriage, Louise is ready to leave her husband for her lover
because she also does not believe in compromises. From this point of union the
narrator tells a blissful story of happiness, and yet there is something ominous lurking
in the background of their idyllic love.
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The fact that Louise has leukemia, and may have a few months to live, breaks
the momentum of the narrator’s quest for total happiness and forces her to face the
possibility of losing the love object to a force bigger than love itself. Although such a
situation is a stock material in the typical romance story, Winterson is very careful not
to breech the line and trivialize the novel by fabricating a sentimental retreat of the
narrator who cannot cope with the loss. Quite on the contrary, while the narrator
really escapes from London into “dirty, depressing, and ideal” Yorkshire, thus giving
no chance to Louise to reconsider following her husband for a treatment in
Switzerland, she gets whole-heartedly into the exploration of another equally
powerful discourse – the discourse of death. (106) She displays the same infatuation
with this new language as she displays with the language of love, this time though
contemplating the impossible force that robs both her vocabulary of meaningful
signifiers and her life of a love object. In the face of a loss or a potential loss of the
love object, psychoanalysis teaches, the ego has no recourse but to fall into mourning
or melancholia.
The striking difference between mourning and melancholia, according to
Freud, is that in mourning there is no loss of self-regard while melancholia completely
dispenses with it. In a Lacanian sense, then, the melancholic is a pathological mourner
since she misunderstands the lack of the object for the loss of the object, and this is a
false premise since what is a lack cannot be lost. In other words, in mourning the ego
is still functioning albeit some “departures” from the normal, while in melancholia the
ego is locked onto an impossible task. For the narrator in Written on the Body the
departure from the normal is clearly one of an obsessive search for meaning in death
while death a priori defies common meaning. This is how she first becomes an
obsessive reader of books about cancer, and then compulsively visits the cancer ward
of the local hospital in search of “something” that can restore meaning,
I continued my training as a cancer specialist. They got to call me the Hospital
Ghoul down at the Terminal Ward. I didn’t care. […]
‘What do you want?’ one of the junior doctors finally asked me.
‘I want to know what it’s like. I want to know what it is.’ (149)
Learning the jargon of death and accepting its language, however, is not
simply an act of defeat, for the narrator. Unless this language of death is internalized
and reworked in the psyche, she sees a similar danger of giving in to the recurrent
banalities that supposedly cure us from a loss of a loved one,
‘You’ll get over it...’ It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone
you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the
11
person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never
closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to
grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the
shape of you and no- one else can fit in. (155)
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The point which the narrator makes here has an extended reference to the basic
Freudian notion of identification. What he considers is that identification is a
“preliminary stage of object-choice […] in which the ego picks out an object,” and
consequently the ego wants to incorporate this object into itself. (1915c: 249) It means
that once the love object is selected, the ego cherishes it as its own part. In this sense
the narrator in the novel is correct that no other object can take exactly the same place
if the love object is lost. What remains possible for her, though, is again to change the
discourse and to meditate on the elements that make the love object what it is,
singular and precious. The narrator engages into a complex discourse that combines
the language of anatomy and poetry in order to express simultaneously the transience
of the flesh and the eternity of the beloved object, so she says,
I became obsessed with anatomy. If I could not put Louise out of my mind I
would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the
dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a
love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the
skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her
synovial fluid. I would recognize her even when her body had long since
fallen away. (111)
The narrator dwells poetically, point by point, on the body of the beloved, not
eulogizing the usual poetic sources like the hair and eyes, but focusing surprisingly on
the clavicle bone or the body cavities for example. This part of the novel uses the
confessional tone of religious writing, yet the text is extremely loaded with poetic
tropes and sexual notes. In the final outcome, as the narrator confesses, it is a book
written on the body of the beloved, not about her body, which makes it a text of
almost religious magnitude,
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain light; the
accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily
worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away
from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn’t know
that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own
book. (89)
Ultimately, the recurrent question that the narrator has is “Why is the measure
of love loss?” and, no doubt, there is no answer that she achieves at the end of the
novel. The book ends as a semi-dream, or a semi-reality, in an open way, as if inviting
the reader to comply with the role of a player and go on beyond the last sentence on
the page. So, “love found, love lost, love found again – maybe,” as Winterson will
unobtrusively suggest and will let us choose our own “better” ending. The writer also
has only the question but not the answer to the enigma that entwines love and loss,
12
and there is no pretense that Written on the Body will ever offer such an answer to the
reader. However, the book conveys a special sense that the way to the answer is
inevitably connected to the very experience of love.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belsey, Catherine. “Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of Desire.” New
Literary History 25 (1994): 683-705.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. “Women in the Beehive: a Seminar with Jacques Derrida.” Men in
Feminism. Ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. New York: Methuen, 1987. 189-203.
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Duncker, Patricia. “Jeanette Winterson and the Aftermath of Feminism.” I’m Telling
You Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading. Ed. Helena Grice and
Tim Woods. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1998. 77-88.
Finney, Bruce. “Bounded by Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body.”
26 January 2005 <http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/Winterson.html>.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Dynamics of Transference,” 1912, SE XII. 99-108.
---. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 1915a, SE XIV. 109-140.
---. “Repression,” 1915b, SE XIV. 146-58
---. “Mourning and Melancholia,” 1915c, SE XIV. 237-260.
---. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926, SE XX.
Kemp, Peter. “Writing for a Fall.” Sunday Times, 26 June 1994, Section 7: 1-2.
Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis. “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.”
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49 (1968). 12 June 2003
http:///www.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/phantasm.htm>.
Salecl, Renata. “I Can’t Love You Unless I Give You Up.” Gaze and Voice as Love
Objects. Ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham: Duke U Press, 1996. 178-205.
Samuels, Robert. Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.
Stevens, Charles R. “Imagining Deregulated Desire: Written on the Body’s
Revolutionary Reconstruction of Gender and Sexuality.” 23 June 2003
<http://www.ags.uci.edu/%7Eclcwegsa/revolutions>.
Winterson, J. Interview with A. Bilger. The Paris Review 145 (1997-98): 68-112.
---. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. New York, NY: Vintage Books,
1995.
---. Written on the Body. London: Vintage Books, 1993.
---. Interview with M. Marvel. Interview 20.10 (October 1990): 165-168.
13
“I must be different when I am out there”
(B)order in First Nations Canadian Lee Maracle’s Novel Ravensong
Kristina Aurylaitė
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Dept. of English, University of Bergen (Norway), doctoral candidate
Dept. of English philology, Vytautas Magnus university (Lithuania), assistant
Email: k.aurylaite@hmf.vdu.lt
A presentation for the
PERFORMING IDENTITY/CROSSING BORDERS
symposium
1
“I must be different when I am out there”
(B)order in First Nations Canadian Lee Maracle’s Novel
Ravensong
There is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers.
(Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life 123)
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Colonial contacts bring together people and cultures of utter difference. Contacts,
Michel de Certeau reminds us, paradoxically create frontiers (127), and difference builds
barriers both as a means of protecting one’s self and subjectivity from the unfamiliar
Otherness and as a means of securing order and avoiding undesired influence. Inscribing
borderlines, demarcating and segmenting space are part of what David Sibley calls
“spatial purification,” the process he sees inherent in the creation of social space (26, 77).
In the colonial situation, this process further entails “territorializing of ethnicity,” as New
would have it (13). Delimiting space for themselves and for ethnic Others allows
colonizers to establish ethnic hierarchies and stage contacts with colonized people on
their own terms.
In this paper I discuss Salish/Métis Lee Maracle’s novel Ravensong (1993) which
depicts two “racial solitudes” (Hoy 137), a white town and indigenous reserve, separated
by a river. I am interested to see how relationships developing along the borderline
transform it into a specific type of lived space: a limit, an obstacle, a protective shelter or
a choice. The border here is, as New puts it, “less a place, a ribbon, a line, than a process
[…]. It is also a set of questions” (28).
Encounters
At the beginning of Ravensong, a small Native girl Celia has a vision of the past in
which she sees an encounter between her people and white newcomers:
Approaching the village from the sea was a tall ship, sails billowing in the wind. All
activity in the village halted. The ship sent a small skiff out to greet the growing
number of people gathering at the shoreline. There were no women in the boat. No
women on the ship. The men scurried about, dragged out their largest feast bowls –
huge carved containers, shaped much like their canoes. Young women were sent
aboard the ship – fifty in all.
The child’s body seized up, twisted itself into fetal position. The women were
returned to the village. They became the first untouchable victims of disease. A new
moral sensibility was required and the old culture died just a little after that. What had
been the customary gratification of human need had brought death among the
villagers. Never again would wolf women serve men in quite the same way. (10)
2
The mis-en-scène staged in this passage foregrounds the difference in each ethnic
group’s response to the contact with the unfamiliar and demonstrates how the first
encounter immediately constructs a racial border between the two cultures. The scene
highlights the indigenous villagers’ openness to contact, which contrasts with the white
sailors’ choice to remain protected behind the (cultural) screen of their ship. The arrival
of the ship is thus a highly performative moment in the text. Together, the two ethnic
groups become engaged in representing and negotiating their differences, and this
engagement rearranges the existent spatial order of the village to transform it into a
different kind of space, a border.
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The border is initially introduced by the white men who stay on the boat and thereby
demonstrate their intent to initiate the interaction with the village’s people on their own
terms. When they receive the fifty indigenous women on board and inferiorize them, the
white men assert their racial and gender dominance. The women are trapped within an
alien spatiality and disempowered, for, as W. H. New notes, “to be exiled is to find
oneself not only away from home but also outside of power” (Borderlands 14). An
ellipsis in the text conceals the details of the women’s contact with the white newcomers;
through this omission the passage suggests rape and, by implication, a violation of Native
cultural borders, constructed as permeable and open to contact.1 A violent initial contact
precludes further interaction and reinstates the racial border. For the women who crossed
this border by stepping on board, this action has transformative power. “Untouchable
victims of disease,” they return to the village literally contaminated by the contact and
inevitably impact their community, which now has to find ways to accommodate this
unexpected and disruptive change.
The encounter between the white sailors and indigenous villagers that Celia sees in
her vision presents two participants in creating a new space, rifted by a rigid racial
border. Despite the white newcomers’ powerful and destructive dominance, which works
to delimit a space for them in the indigenous territory, Maracle’s novel asserts a strong
presence of the indigenous side of the border in the creation and living of the new space.
This early scene is central to Ravensong, as it introduces the major motifs which govern
the narrative. It predicts the destructiveness of the contact between indigenous people and
white settlers, epitomized in the novel through the theme of a disease, which devastates
the Native village. It highlights the disastrous effect that the contact with white
patriarchal culture has on indigenous women. Finally, it sketches the spatial order, which
controls the action of the novel. Ravensong is set in 1954, a century after the events
described in Celia’s vision, and centers on a flu epidemic as it devastates a small Native
reserve on Canada’s Northwest Coast. The protagonist Stacey, a seventeen-year-old
1
Rape of a Native woman is a recurrent motif in First Nations literature, where it metaphorically stands for the
colonisation and violation of Native land. See e.g. Tomson Highway’s play The Rez Sisters, his novel Kiss of the
Fur Queen, Beatrice Culleton’s novel In Search of April Raintree.
3
indigenous girl, is about to graduate from school in Maillardville, a white town situated
across the river from her home reserve. As she helps her community fight the epidemic,
Stacey insistently compares the two spaces and the laws governing them. Like the fifty
young women sent to the white boat in Celia’s vision, Stacey serves as an agent of
contact with the white culture. Similarly to them, she asserts her difference in the white
town and brings the white world to the reserve. Unlike them, she is aware of the hazards
of interaction with white culture – especially its men – and carefully protects the border
that separates her from white people.
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A century after the initial encounter of the white and Native people on the Northwest
Coast, an indigenous elder Dominic asks Stacey, who has expressed her doubts about
going to university in Vancouver: “How else are we to learn how we are to live with
them?” (154). Two decades prior to implementing Canada’s politics of multiculturalism
(1971) and a decade to the country’s indigenous people’s gaining citizenship (1960), the
white-indigenous border of the 1950s in Canada is a border of strict binaries, hierarchies
and what Homi Bhabha calls “fixed” differences (2). Lee Maracle’s choice to “displace”
the narrative into the early 1950s thus serves to highlight racial tensions inherent in the
situation where the border “territorializes ethnicity” (New 23), and precludes active
borderline engagements. Instead, the border which separates Stacey’s reserve from the
white town of Maillardville is now indeed constructed of an endless set of questions, as
New puts it (28). The questions concern seemingly insurmountable differences between
the two ethnic communities, and bewilderment is the dominant reaction in both sides’
attempts to tackle them. Stacey, who daily leaves her home reserve to attend school in the
white town, and whose visible Otherness there further reinforces the barrier between
white and indigenous people, struggles to find out how this border came into being and
what continues to necessitate it. Stacey’s repeated border crossing is thus a quest for
answers, which, if found, could possibly undo the rigid line separating the two
communities.
Preserving the Border
When Michel de Certeau theorizes place as a rigid positioning of elements in which
neither overlapping nor movement is possible, which is neither alive nor vibrant (117),
his description is very close to the spatial arrangement of the reserve and the town in the
narrative as two adjacent segments, neatly demarcated by the river. Reminiscent of the
lines of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s tracing map which fixes and controls
elements in space (12-13), this demarcation, predicted in the early scene of the encounter
between indigenous people and white settlers, constitutes an “order […] in accord with
which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence,” which “excludes the
possibility of two things being in the same location” and “implies an indication of
stability” (de Certeau 117). Stacey’s ethnicity as an indigenous person in the Canada of
4
the early 1950s (b)orders and confines her to the reserve, marked by poverty, seclusion
and marginalization.
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These communities are caught up in the power politics of the colonizer-colonized
binary, which positions them in stark contrast to one another and precludes interaction. “I
must be different when I am out there,” realizes Stacey (134). She has unawares
internalized the precept to alter and comply with the order of the white town’s space and
its socializing role as long as she wants to be allowed entrance to the other side of the
bridge. Stacey’s deduction thus foregrounds the transformative power of space, but also
establishes her as an outsider and an observer as opposed to an active participant in the
white town. Admitted to a white school as a student, Stacey, the only Native person there,
soon experiences how her white schoolmates immediately space her out through “the
insults, the loneliness, the silence of others who preferred the pretence of her nonexistence” and “the derisive laughter” (26, 28). Nor does she herself seek to be involved
in youthful deeds and conspiracies of her classmates: “[n]othing to do with me,” she
shrugs away an empathic desire to stand for one of them, Polly, who is being laughed at
and condemned by other girls for a sexual indiscretion she has committed with her
boyfriend (29). The dictum of rejecting the Other – “she’s white so she don’t count”
(135) – followed by both sides of the border governs the rigid spatial order, constructed
in the novel through Stacey as a major focalizer.
Thus, seen by her community as an agent of contact and change, Stacey nevertheless
avoids contacts and active involvement, limiting her experience of the white town to
school and books. Stacey’s behavior, typical also of the majority of people from the
reserve, shows that the racial border is lived as a restrictive limit. It is a representational
space of division and difference. Lived this way, unlike borders theorized by Homi
Bhabha as spaces of interactions and transformations (2-3), this border reinforces the
fixity of representations of difference which lies on the other side, engenders stereotypes,
and precludes change. Ravensong demonstrates that lived as a dividing line the border
entails predisposition, judgment and categorization. It does not tolerate contact and
interaction because they are seen as threatening to both cultural and personal identity.
Just as the border is not a space of interaction in Ravensong, its opposite side,
whiteness, is never an admired and desired quality either – the motif that marks numerous
texts by indigenous writers, from Beatrice Culleton-Mossionier’s novel In Search of April
Raintree (1983) to Floyd Favel’s more contemporary play Lady of Silences (1998), which
demonstrate how whiteness has been internalized as a normative value, which guarantees
both personal and social success. In Ravensong however, through Stacey’s focalization,
whiteness is predominantly described as situated “out there” (134) and is Othered as
incompatible and threatening. In a study of what she calls “outsider discourses,” a
cognitive linguist Melinda Yuen-ching Chen argues that a “moment of speech in which
an ‘other’ group is defined by myself, or ‘us,’ by its inclusion, exclusion, and division,
5
constitutes an act of identity” (91). By insisting, in her discourse and behavior, on the
gulf between her own Native community and the white townspeople, Stacey thus seeks to
retain her identity, as she knows it, intact. Or, according to Stuart Hall’s definition of
identity as “points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive
practices construct for us” (6), Stacey tries to hold onto the familiar points of attachment
to assert her subjectivity to resist the influence her excursuses into the white space might
have on her. Which they do, as is obvious from the verdict Stacey’s mother makes after
Stacey performs an indiscretion by spending a day in the mountains unchaperoned with
lesbians Rena and white German Judy: “The law is simple, Stacey, and this family lives
within it. If your schooling persuades you otherwise, don’t come back.”(124) Ostracism
and expelling her into the white space would specifically imply the loss of points of
attachment and thus of the basis of who she is. For this reason, in her own terms Stacey
makes “no family and no place […] synonymous” (184).
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Melinda Yuen-ching Chen links the concept of identity to perspective from which we
define others and, consequently, ourselves (91) and thus to a position in space (93). She
then comments on how frequently identity groups in society are described in terms of a
“region in space,” which, if it has borders, is perceived and construed as a “container”
(97). While Chen’s observation recalls W. H. New’s discussion of “territorializing of
ethnicity” (Borderlands 13), where territorializing is not a physical, but a metaphorical
process, Chen proposes to consider the surface of such spatial containers and,
specifically, its inevitable opacity. In this case, she suggests, “the image available to an
observer from the outside is only the surface itself, rather than the inside of the container”
(97), and the greater the distance from the surface, the more of it is accessible to the
viewer (99). The model described by Chen helps capture the ambiguity of Stacey’s
spatial position and perspective. While she, the community’s agent of contact, crosses the
border into the white town on a regular basis and even feels at times that she brings the
white world into her reserve (106), Stacey never fully accesses the white container space,
being limited to observing its surface: “Stacey alone moved about in the others’ world.
She moved about in it somewhat catatonically, as though she could not see through its
façade of polite hierarchy. She seemed unable to get under it to expose it enough to find
the key to its transformation.” (44) Even if she is physically and legitimately present in
the white town, she refuses to leave the borders of the metaphorical container – the
Native community – and from this perspective is limited to seeing only the surface of the
white space, the “façade” of its spatial order. Nor is she welcomed to cross it, of which
fact she is reminded by the letter of acceptance to the University of British Columbia,
concluding with “We aren’t sure how your status as an Indian affects your enrolment in
this particular faculty” (91). Stacey reads this sentence as a “snag” (92) as she intuits how
it is still another instance of confining her to the “territory” of her ethnicity, to “where she
belongs.”
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Chen contends that even when distanced from the “exclusionary container,” a viewer
can still benefit from an “overview, a vista, a command of description that gives her
perceptual access to a greater portion of the container’s surface. This constitutes novel or
privileged knowledge.” (99) Stacey’s “almost anthropological gaze” directed at the white
town (Leggatt 171) similarly grants her specific knowledge, even if it reveals more about
Stacey herself and her community than it does about white people’s space At the same
time, the opacity of the surface of the alien container-space does not encourage attentive
observation or analysis. “Why compare us to them?” reacts Rena to Stacey’s explanation,
expressing her refusal to grant white society normative value (115). Thus Stacey’s
continuous border crossing back and forth does not animate the space constructed in the
novel, but traps her along the axis drawn between the reserve and the white town, and in
the endless “grocery list of the differences between white town houses, buildings, and our
own,” as Stacey puts it (115). Therefore, the bridge connecting the two communities does
not have the aura of temptation that characterizes “half-open” spaces (Bachelard 24). In
Ravensong, the bridge is a reminder of the proximity to the racial Other, and is charged
with tension.
Destabilizing the Border
In an article on the major motif of the novel, the Hong Kong flu epidemic that
devastates the indigenous reserve, Judith Leggatt discusses pollution taboos obeyed by
each community in order to protect themselves from contamination, understood in both
physical terms and as a negative cultural influence (163-78). Leggatt shows how the
pollution taboos serve to reinstate the (b)order governing the two communities as they
prevent cross-cultural contacts, and how the epidemic, caused by Native trickster Raven,
is Raven’s attempt to animate the stasis of the existent (b)order by making a “creative
mess, which can force a society to re-evaluate its norms” by fostering communication
(166-67).
In the narrative, the epidemic Raven brings to the Northwest Coast – another in a
row of illnesses devastating Native reserves – parallels the colonial contact as described
in young Celia’s vision in the opening pages of the novel. Both turn out to have been part
of trickster Raven’s plan to cure white people by exposing them to the diversity of world
cultures and teaching them to share. Both have slipped out of Raven’s control and
become destructive to indigenous communities, obviously because of the white
newcomers’ inability to interpret the lesson.
By constructing white colonization as a trickster project primarily directed at
white people, the novel unhesitantly deprives them of agency and subverts the colonial
power-hierarchy. Even the absence of communication is insistently suggested to be the
choice of the colonized indigenous inhabitants before it is a result of white
discrimination. Nevertheless, the parallel between colonization and a physical illness
7
allows the narrative to construe the two ethnic groups as sick patients, who have to learn
to accommodate the change in their situation and the customary reality (see also Leggatt
166-67). Thus, while the novel’s emphasis on the ethnic segmentation foregrounds how
(dis)eased the rigid (b)order governing the two communities is, Raven expects that the
physical epidemic she inflicts will disturb its stagnate sterility, and bring about a
necessary, if catastrophic, as Leggatt notes, change, able to introduce a different and
potentially more “beneficial” social order (167).
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Raven’s plans to bring white and Native people into a beneficial contact fail on the
larger scale. The thick silence transforms the bridge from a space lived as a contact zone
into a protective demarcation line. However, the destructive change the epidemic
introduces does trigger some transformations that destabilize the racial border. Stacey,
usually spaced out in the white town and rendered invisible as she prefers to keep
distance between herself and the “container” of white society in Melinda Yuen-ching
Chen’s terms (97), suddenly disturbs the sterility of the white space. When she bluntly
disobeys the teacher’s order to serve a detention for being late to school after a sleepless
night tending the sick, Stacey manifestly asserts her difference and initiates a
renegotiation of the existent power relations in the colonizer-colonized binary. She
engages into an argument with the school principal during which she openly refuses to
follow the rules – Henri Lefebvre’s “socializing role” (191) – that govern the school
space and white society in general (65-68).
This moment in the narrative marks Stacey’s decisive rift with her usual compliance
to the transformative power of the white space. Before that, however visibly different, she
plays the role of what Daniel Francis calls “a white man’s Indian,” a tamed and
acculturated Other (114, 117). One of the best students in her class, Stacey embodies the
ideal of white assimilation politics. Her formal compliance with the order of the white
space thus reinforces the racial (b)order and, simultaneously, reduces her to an exotic
spectacle in the eyes of white people. “The Indian girl from across the river is here to see
you” (66): the terms in which the school secretary Mrs. Cramer informs the principal
about Stacey’s visit depersonalize her by labeling her and by defining her as a region in
space. Acts of (mis)naming are manifestations of power as they include or exclude, allow
or deny access. The secretary’s words thus explicitly reinstate the demarcation line
between Stacey’s Nativeness and her own whiteness (cf. Leggatt’s discussion of pollution
taboos and cross-cultural contamination) and deny her membership to the space to which
Stacey has legal access. However acculturated and compliant with the white order, Stacey
is thus reduced to potentially contaminating physicality: she is a body, an exotic shape
and thus an empty signifier which white viewers can fill with a chosen meaning.
Kaja Silverman argues that the body “is always an image in the eyes of the Other”
(11-12). Similarly to cognitivist Melinda Yuen-ching Chen, Silverman attributes this
tendency to perspective, “the place of the Other,” and foregrounds violence usually
8
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implicit in the process (12). The body seen this way is thus devoid of its individual reality
as it is insistently reduced to representation. As long as, while on the white side, Stacey
behaves according to the expectations of the racial Other, it construes her specifically in
terms of representation. As soon as she breaks the prescribed order – trickster-like, as the
novel repeatedly suggests – the chaos and the (dis)ease she creates allows Stacey to
become an assertive performative presence, in full control of her subjectivity. After “all
hell br[eaks] loose” in the classroom following her retort to the teacher (66), Stacey is no
longer an emblem easy to categorize, “transparent” and predictable; she is now a reality
which has power to influence her interactions with the Other and its constructions of her:
“The students looked at her differently now. Actually, it was more like they saw her for
the first time. […] Now her invisibility at school was greatly disturbed by her resistance”
(69). Steve, the class intellectual who falls in love with her, also attempts to initiate a
relationship with Stacey only after she has become “visible” by articulating her opinion
and Otherness, even at the risk of being expelled from school and prevented from
pursuing her dream to enter university and become a teacher. In doing this, she is no
longer a “white man’s Indian,” but “the little town’s personal challenge” (69). In doing
this, she – trickster-like – destabilizes the rigid racial (b)order by creating a new kind of
space, an actual performative “contact zone” in Marie Louise Pratt’s terms, interactive
and improvisational (6-7), not on the bridge, but right in the white city.
9
Works cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. New York: The
Orion, 1964.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984. Trans. Steven Rendall.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Chen, Melinda Yuen-ching. “The Space in Identity: A Cognitivist Approach to
“Outsider” Discourses.” Us and Others: Social Identities Across Languages,
Discourses and Cultures. Ed. Anna Duszak. Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing, 2002. 87-109.
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23
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 1988.
Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture.
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1992.
Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs Identity?” Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall and
Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 1-52.
Hoy, Helen. How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada. Toronto: U of
Toronto P, 2001.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991.
Leggatt, Judith. “Raven’s Plague: Pollution and Disease in Lee Maracle’s Ravensong.”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 33. 4 (December
2000): 163-78.
Maracle, Lee. Ravensong. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1993.
New, W. H. Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada. Vancouver: U of British
Columbia P, 1998.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Sibley, David. Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Silverman, Kaja. “Speak, Body.” Discourse. 22. 2 (Spring 2000): 8-24.
10
RE-THINKING ARTISTS IN TRANSIT
Isil Egrikavuk & Georgia Kotretsos
In 2001, fifteen Biennials took place around the world. In 2002, nineteen; in
2003, seventeen; in 2004 nineteen and in 2006 the grand total of 27 biennials were
organized, some of which were making their official debut on the scene. In 2007, fifteen
Biennials have been announced.
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Since the early 90's the Biennial tradition turned into the epidemic of
Biennialization as we know it today.
Its contagious nature spread rapidly among
peripheral art communities and lured in art professionals from all four corners of the
world. Biennials opened our art world to Art Histories that had been neglected in the past
on an international level; they were and still can be informative and critical platforms
1
where Contemporary Art can be re-thought, re-evaluated and re-articulated. Yet, the
pervasive model slowly seemed to loose ground in terms of the classic fashion – like a
great song is being overplayed on the radio. The word Biennial completes the title of over
50 international grandiose exhibitions around the world. This commitment is no longer
the case for the Biennial Ceará América Fortaleza, Brazil; the Five Continents and One
City Biennial, Mexico City, USA; the Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa and the
media city Seoul Biennial, South Korea. Others have been inconsistent in honoring that
very commitment, which nurtures art professional’s critical itch.
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Biennials have made their debut since 2000.
Either way nearly 20
We have to acknowledge though that the
"mother" Biennial, which takes place in Venice since 1895 serves as the inspiration of the
mimicry we are witnessing over the last 15 years.
Participating in a Biennial is recognized as a prestigious achievement for an artist.
Specifically in the model of the Venice Biennial artists do not only present their work,
but also become representatives of their “native” countries by showing at national
pavilions. Venice Biennial seems to reinforce the idea of nomadism, but its structure
supports the contrary. The notion of borders is imposed upon the Biennial and as a
results it reflects globalization. Our critique focuses on how commissioners, curators and
artists deal with this ethnocentric categorization and how that affects their practice.
Mika Hannula in his essay, “New Hope For the Dead” questions the legitimacy
and credibility of Biennials in relation to their plethora worldwide. He further prods at the
matter by closely looking at their context and identity.
If and when the only identity that an event has is that it is just an international
biennial, then there is no chance of it producing anything other than just more of
the same. However, if and when a given biennial is constantly in search of its own
particular identity, things all of a sudden seem much more interesting. The
2
difference is telling, and it is crucial. Borrowing from Miwon Kwon’s vocabulary,
instead of biennials at site just happening one after another, the task is to shape
them so that they happen next to one another.
Hannula does not fall into generalizations and certainly we do not wish to project
a demonized perspective of Biennials, but we insist in exposing this problematic side of
the Venice Biennial with the rather rudimentary analogy of Eurovision1. Europe’s
boarders are still very much alive in people’s consciousness, culture and education. Sadly
it is amplified in the Eurovision Song Contest when countries are invited to present a Pop
song that will be voted from all competing countries. Participating countries project very
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distinct musical, cultural characteristic inspired from their own traditions. It is one of
those social events fans get really patriotic about, wave flags, methodically cast their
votes and religiously get glued on their TV monitors hoping their country will win. Even
the preliminary domestic competition commands immense national media attention, and
fan frenzy. We never witnessed our so-called victory as children when the competition
still served as innocent entertainment for us but finally in 2003, Turkey won the
competition and later on in 2005 Greece did as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23DV5Pd9RFo&mode=related&search=
1
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual competition held between active member countries of the European
Broadcasting Union (EBU), in which participating countries each submit a song to be performed on live television; then
proceed to cast votes for the other countries' songs, in order to find the most popular song in the competition. Each
country participates via one of their national EBU-member television stations, whose task it is to select a singer and a
song to go forward to represent the country in the international competition.
The Contest has been broadcast every year since its inauguration in 1956, and is one of the longest-running television
programmes in the world. It is also one of the most-watched non-sporting events in the world,[1] with audience figures
having been quoted in recent years as anything between 100 million and 600 million internationally.[2][3] It has been
broadcast around the globe — beyond Europe — to such places as Australia, Canada, Egypt, Jordan, Hong Kong, India,
Korea, New Zealand and the USA; even though these countries do not participate.[4] Since the year 2000, the Contest
has also been broadcast over the Internet;[5] with more than 74,000 people in almost 140 countries having watched the
2006 edition online.[6]
The Contest is historically known for being mainly a bastion of formulaic, orchestrated pop music. However it has featured
a vast, diverse array of songs, including such musical genres as Arab, Balkan, Celtic music, Dance, Folk, Israeli, Greek,
Latin, Metal, Nordic, Pop-rap, Rock, and Turkish.
Over the years, the Song Contest has grown from a mere televisual experiment into an international institution of
mammoth proportions. Most countries in Europe have taken part at least once during the Contest's history, and such is
the magnitude and scale of the Contest that the word "Eurovision" is one of the few household names to be recognized
across an entire continent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest
3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe0nKho8DI
In the Youtube live Eurovision videos, one can easily distinguish the motifs that
are linked with national prototypes. The rhythm of the songs, their dancing and the
costumes contribute to a constructed representation of their nationality. One may
plausibly question our line of thinking in relation to Biennials but when one reads the
titles of the Afghan, Egyptian, Israeli and Venezuelan participation in this year’s Venice
Biennial, will connect our observation with the nationalistic profile of such events.
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AFGHANISTAN
Afghanistan My Love! Creative genius – witness of destructions and rebirth
EGYPT
Egypt ... sources of civilization ... and junction of cultures
ISRAEL
The Guardians of the Threshold
VENEZUELA
Gods of America
It is not a coincidence that these titles come from peripheral art communities. The
problem is that, while promoting international identity and mobility, the Venice Biennial
creates the opposite effect of exoticism and curiosity of the unknown. The works and
titles become documents of social, political, historical, cultural and geographical states of
the countries represented. Geography and its politics are often explored within different
contexts in contemporary art but how one chooses to address this issue or contextualize
its participation is very complex.
Everyone is in transit; everyone is a so-called post-nomad (Morley, 210). This
nomadic life eventually raises many questions of time/space, belonging and identity.
Where does one belong when he/she is in constant movement? In what space and what
4
time? Zygmunt Bauman defines this constant flux as “a series of improvisations, moving
through time/space and simultaneously through a series of new identities.” (Morley, 210)
Homi Bhabha describes this phenomenon of transition as a “Third space”, “where the
familiar and the foreign are conjoined, where it is less clear where home concludes and
foreign begins.” Where do Biennials stand in relation to third space? Do they succeed in
creating a space for artists, where the borders of geography become indivisible? Or do
these events turn into giant spectacles, like Eurovision and the audience into fanatic fans?
Surely, it is hard to say that the answer is one or the other, but there is and should be
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alternative modes of creating cultural productions without falling into the category of
romanticizing places or creating stereotypical identities. State funding organizations,
commissioners, curators and artists need to resist collectively to this model, if inclusivity
is what the art world seeks.
Beatrice
Born 1972, Berlin, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany/Amsterdam,
The Netherlands/London, United Kingdom
BFA – School of Visual Arts
New York, United States
Rijks Academy Residency
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Selected exhibitions:
2003
2004
2005
2005
2006
2007
– 1st Prague Biennial, Czech Republic
– Busan Biennial, Republic Korea
– 3rd Goteburg Biennial, Sweden
– 7th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates
– 27th Sao Paolo Biennial, Brazil
– 10th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey
5
Fenuku
Born 1972, Cairo, Egypt
Lives and works in New York, USA/Cairo, Egypt
BFA – Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
MFA – Central Saint Martins College
London, United Kingdom
Whitney Independent Study Program
New York, United States
Selected exhibitions:
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2001 –
2003 –
2004 –
2006 –
2007 –
2007 –
4th Caribbean Biennial, Dominican Republic
2nd Tirana Biennial, Albania
3rd Berlin Biennial, Germany
Dak’Art Biennial, Senegal
2nd Moscow Biennial, Russia
Biennale Montreal
Instead of discussing existing artists’ work and career moves, we chose to fabricate two
accomplished characters, who derive from our research. They represent the generation
that boomed alongside the phenomenon of Biennialization. We have come across artists
who have participated in ten Biennials by the age of thirty-three and it is a career pattern
worth discussing in terms of the work that is being produced.
Trans-nationality should not only be about mobility, it cannot exclusively be
created by traveling through borders. We are not referring to geographical demarcated
borders but ideological ones that need be subverted. When in 2007 the last iconic border
wall is slowly coming down in Cyprus, how long will it be before the Art ones follow?
6
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhabha, Homi K.,The location of culture, London ; New York : Routledge, 1994.
Biemann, Ursula, Geography and the politics of mobility, Wien : Generali Foundation ; Köln
: König, 2003.
Clifford, James, Routes : travel and translation in the late twentieth century, Cambridge,
Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997.
Morley, David, Home territories : media, mobility and identity, London ; New York :
Routledge, 2000.
Rogoff, Irit, Terra infirma : geography's visual culture, London ; New York : Routledge,
2000.
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Said, Edward W. Power, politics, and culture : intervie ws with Edward W. Said / edited
and with an introduction by Gauri Vis wanathan.
New York : Pantheon Books c2001.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York : Vintage Books, 1979, c1978.
7
BIENNIAL BOARD
Solid colors helps us follow
Biennials on the board
2005
Other International art
meeting such as Triennials
or Documenta
2004
Inconsistent appearances
2007
2006
2003
2002
1
2nd Moscow Biennale
Russia
12th Asian Art Biennale
Bangladesh
1st Moscow Biennale
Russia
11th Asian Art Biennale
Bangladesh
6th Sharjah Biennial
United Arab Emirates
2
3rd Auckland Triennial
New Zealand
4th berlin biennale
Germany
7th Sharjah Biennial
United Arab Emirates
3rd berlin
biennial Germany
2nd Göteburg
Biennial Sweden
5th Kochi
International
Triennial
Exhibition of
Prints Ino, Pref.
Kochi,
Japan
2nd Fukuoka Asian
Art Triennale
Japan
3
Bienal del Fin del
Mundo
Argentina
9th Havana Biennial
Cuba
Prague Biennale 2
Czech Republic
6th Periferic
Biennial Iasi
Romania
25th São Paulo
Biennial
Brazil
4
8th Sharjah Biennial
United Arab Emirates
IV Bienal Internacional
de Estandartes
Mexico
51th Venice Biennial
Italy
2nd Valencia
Biennial
Spain
4th Gwangju
Biennial
South Korea
Barcelona Art
Report Spain
5
9th International
Biennial of Cuenca
Ecuador
Dak'Art 2006
Senegal
inSite_05 San
Diego/USA &
Tijuana/Mexico
8th Cuenca
Biennial International
Painting Biennial
Ecuador
6th Dak'Art Biennial of
Contemporary African
Art
Senegal
Busan Biennale Republic
Korea
50th Venice Biennial
Italy
3rd Ibero American
Biennial Lima
Peru
6
Biennale Montréal
Canada
11th Biennial of Visual
Arts Pancevo
Serbia - Montenegro
Biennale of Sydney
Australia
Dakar Biennial
Senegal
Prague Biennale 3
Czech Republic
3rd Göteburg
Biennial
Sweden
3rd Tirana Biennial
Albania
Prague Biennale 1
Czech Republic
7
52nd Venice Biennial
Italy
8th Lyon Biennial
France
Manifesta
4 Frankfurt/M.,
Germany
Yokohama
Triennale
Japan
9
documenta 12
Germany
Biennale of Sydney
Australia
9th Istanbul Biennial
Turkey
Manifesta 5 European
Biennial of Contemp.
Art Donostia-San
Sebastián
Spain
SITE Santa Fe 5th
International
Biennial Santa Fe
2nd Echigo-Tsumari
Art Triennial
Tokamachi
Japan
1st CP Open
Biennale
Indonesia
Biennial Sydney
Australia
8
2nd Bucharest
Biennale
Romania
Busan Sculpture
Project Part of the
Busan Biennale
Republic Korea
Arts Le Havre
France
49th Venice
Biennial Internatio
nal Art Exhibition
Italy
Biennial of
Valencia
Spain
6th Lyon Biennial
France
2nd Tirana Biennial
Albania
Documenta
XI Kassel, Germany
1st Tirana Biennial
Albania
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Indicates the debut of a
Biennial
2001
Biennial Cairo
Egypt
Sharjah International
Art Biennial
United Arab
Emirates
2nd berlin biennale
Germany
BIENNIAL BOARD
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New Mexico, USA
Cetinje Biennial V Artists
from South-East Europe
and the Middle
East Cetinje (Montenegro),
Tirana (Albania), Dubrovnik
(Croatia)
5th Gwangju Biennial
Republic Korea
10
Sculpture Projects
Muenster 07 – Germany
3rd Biennale of
Ceramics in
Contemporary
Art Albisola,
Italy
3rd Fukuoka Asian Art
Triennale
Japan
11
6th Mercosur Biennial
Brazil
29th Pontevedra Art
Biennial Pontevedra
Spain
12
10 Istanbul Biennial
Turkey
3rd Echigo-Tsumari
Triennale
Japan
2nd Beijing
International Art
Biennale
China
3rd Valencia Biennial
Spain
13
1st Athens Biennial
Greece
Singapore Biennale
Singapore
Yokohama Triennale
Japan
4th Biennale de Montréal
Canada
14
9th Lyon Biennial
France
6th Shanghai Biennial
China
5th Mercosur
Biennial Porto Alegre
Brazil
26th São Paulo Biennial
Brazil
15
Biennial of Young
Artists from Europe
and the Mediterranean
Egypt
7th Werkleitz
Biennale Halle
Germany
Shanghai Biennale China
16
Gwangju Biennial
Republic Korea
Lodz Biennale Lodz
Poland
17
Busan Biennale
Contemporary Art
Exhibition and Sea Art
Festival.
Republic Korea
1st International Biennial
of Contemporary Art
Spain
18
Liverpool Biennial
United Kingdom
Taipei Biennial Taiwan
32
th
Liverpool Biennial United
Kingdom
7th Biennial of Lyon
France
1st Biennial of
Ceramic in
Contemporary
Art Albisola
Italy
13th Latin
American and
Caribbean Print
Biennial San Juan
Puerto Rico
1st Beijing
International Art
Biennale
– China
8th Istanbul Biennial
Turkey
Asia-Pacific
Triennial Brisbane
Australia
7th Istanbul
Biennial
Turkey
Liverpool Biennial
UK
2nd Biennale of
Ceramics in
Contemporary
Art Albisola
Italy
4th Mercosur
Biennial Porto
Alegre
Brazil
5th African
Photography
Festival Rencontres de
la Photographie
Africaine Bamako,
Mali
8th Havana Biennial
Cuba
8th Baltic Triennial
of International
Art Vilnius
Lithuania
Third Space. ARS
01 Museum of
Contemp. Art
Kiasma,
Helsinki/Finland
3rd Mercosur
Biennial Porto
Alegre
Brazil
5th Caribbean
Biennial Santo
Domingo, Dominican
Republic
Busan Biennial
South Korea
7th International
Painting Biennial
Ecuador
III Biennale de
Montréal
Canada
4th Caribbean
Biennial Santo
Domingo
Dominican Republic
MAAP
2002 (Multimedia Art
Asia Pacific) Beijing,
China
Shanghai Biennale
China
Taipei Biennial
Taiwan
BIENNIAL BOARD
19
Manifesta 6 European
Biennial of Contemp.
Art Nicosia
Cyprus
20
SCAPE Biennial
New Zealand
15th Biennale de Paris
France
27th São Paulo
Biennial
Brazil
BIACS
2 International
Biennial of
Contemp. Art
Sevilla, Spain
21
22
23
24
Taipei
Biennial Taiwan
25
1st Canary
Biennial for Art,
Architecture and
Landscape Cana
ry Islands, Spain
26
APT 2006 Asia-Pacific
Triennial Brisba
ne, Australia
27
10th Cairo
Biennial Egypt
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Triennial Poli/Gráfica San
Juan Puerto Rico
Biennale Ceará
América Fortaleza,
Brazil
“‘Finding Another Face Inside My Face’:
The Semiotics of Mime in Edgar Nkosi White’s
Racialized Dramaturgies”
Núria Casado Gual, University of Lleida
According to Tadeusz Kowzan, facial mime may be regarded as the system of
kinetic signs that is closest to verbal expression. Indeed, the actor’s face can generate a
large number of signs, all of them conveying the feelings, sensations and thoughts
experienced by the actor during the performance. (Kowzan 1992: 172) At the same
time, as Kowzan contends, mime constitutes −together with gesture− the most personal
and individualized expressive mode in the theatre, (Kowzan 1992: 172) submitted as it
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is to the performer’s physical, psychological and actoral idiosyncrasies. In this light,
Anne Ubersfeld’s statement that the practical and theoretical complexity of the analysis
of mime is almost infinite (1997: 224) is far from being hyperbolic. However, it is
possible to observe certain constant features in the mimic design of a dramatist that do
not necessarily depend on the actors’ peculiarities and which may be analyzed.
In Edgar Nkosi White’s dramatic production, mimic expression plays a
prominent role: indeed, a broad variety of facial inscriptions informs both the dialogues
and stage directions of his plays. Even if the mimic signs devised by this AfroCaribbean playwright have a variety of functions, most of them expose the inner and
external tensions underlying situations of racial oppression. Considering the double axis
of gaze and mouth which, as Anne Ubersfeld points out, determines facial expression,
(1997: 224) this paper intends to analyze the mimic expressivity of Edgar Nkosi
White’s characters and its specific contribution to the author’s theatricalization of the
phenomenon of racialism. At a more general level, the mimic designs inscribed in Edgar
Nkosi White’s extensive dramatic work will be shown to unveil the discourse of
ambivalence that tinges the racialized body when this is portrayed and represented from
the victim’s point of view.
Starting with the expressive axis created by the gaze, facial expressions
underlining the conflictive potential of a line, gesture or movement through the eyes
stand out as the most abundant in the author’s dramaturgies. Hence, faces connoting
concern, (I, Marcus Garvey 258) nervousness, (The Nine Night 17) embarrassment, (I,
Marcus Garvey 260) power, (Like Them That Dream 96) cunning, (The Mummer’s Play
1
155) suspicion, (Ritual by Water 53, The Boot Dance 109) defiance, (The Boot Dance
104) disdain, (The Lovesong for Langston 68) or anger (I, Marcus Garvey 263)
constitute indexical signs of the varied types of tensions that unsettle Black and White
victims and oppressors in discriminatory situations or in circumstances derived from a
racist background. Though with a lesser degree of troubling charge, mimic signs which
indicate a moment of sudden, uncontrolled emotion, (Lament for Rastafari 18, The Boot
Dance 142) as well as facial expressions of gravity, (Lament for Rastafari 12)
disappointment, (That Generation 181) nostalgia (Redemption Song 26) or sadness,
(Redemption Song 80, The Boot Dance 113) may also be understood as underscoring
the wounds that racial marginalization inflicts upon the victim.
All the signs of conflict conveyed through the expressivity of the eyes in Edgar
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Nkosi White’s theatre can be said to portray racial oppression at a close-up level. This is
also demonstrated every time a character alludes to the faces of the oppressed and what
is harboured in them in his dramatic work. In Les Femmes Noires, for instance, an AfroAmerican girl called Carolyn wants to tell her mother about “those faces” which she
sees on the streets: “Black faces. So many tribes. Eyes crazy.” (173) The mental
hallucinations suffered by a Black beggar called Cipo in the same play can be
interpreted in a similar way: “My mind gets flooded with voices and faces, too many
faces.” (Les Femmes Noires 174) As these lines show, the stamp of White-on-Black
oppression is often concentrated on the eyes of the victim. This is reflected in The Life
and Times of J. Walter Smintheus when Robert writes to Smintheus: “… I could see in
your eyes the same animal furtiveness that was in mine. That is, in the eyes of all black
students at big Ivy League colleges. We know we don’t belong here.” (15) Smintheus
observes the same mark of oppression in the Black prostitute that becomes his lover
when he tells her that “the implications of [her] eyes hurt [him] too much.” (The Life
and Times of J. Walter Smintheus 62) The same occurs to the Black South African
protagonist of The Boot Dance when, looking at photographs of himself when he first
went to England, he tells another character: “The eyes… see the eyes different.” (130)
The haunting power of gazes and faces is even more enhanced in Edgar Nkosi
White’s work whenever oppression is mirrored in deadly facial expressions. Mimic
manifestations of death are observed in the oppressor’s looks: the West Indian
protagonist of Ritual by Water says he does not want to die in England “where people
already look like death,” (51) and in The Boot Dance Lazarus explains how his father
alluded to White people as “the dead” or as “the souls of the dead come back.” (100)
2
However, the deadly mimic signs also characterize the victim’s face, as implicit in Like
Them That Dream when the main character, a South African man called Sparrow,
describes his marginalized existence in New York by saying that “death was in [his]
mouth, in [his] eyes …” (123) Interestingly enough, allusion to deadly faces may imply
a momentary reproduction of this effect by the actor who is speaking. Through the
eradication of mimic expressivity in the actor’s deadly mask, the playwright signifies
the zombification of the Self to which racialism ultimately leads.
Whereas the facial signs of conflict cited above underline the negativity implicit
in racialist situations and the range of conflictive emotions they are capable of
generating, other mimic expressions reproduced through the eyes of Edgar Nkosi
White’s figures seem to contradict the negation of Selfhood to which the victim of
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racial oppression is submitted and in which the oppressor, albeit indirectly, is also
entrapped. As a matter of fact, this mimic paradox of signifieds could be understood as
a theatrical necessity; for dramatic conflict is born out of oppositions and the
performing arts in general are nurtured from contrasts. Beyond this performative
strategy, however, the contradictory manifestations of mime inscribed in Edgar Nkosi
White’s plays are expressive vehicles through which aspects of oppression that may not
be conveyed otherwise are ostended, thereby demonstrating, again in Anne Ubersfeld’s
words, that mime can express what cannot be communicated through other corporeal
manifestations. (1997: 229)
In this vein, the playwright re-presents the peculiar degree of unsettling
happiness felt by a victim of racialism when recognizing, even understanding, his/her
own experience through the eyes of another character. This is mirrored in Ritual by
Water, for example, when a West Indian boy called Silence stares at his tutor’s
girlfriend “intently for a long time” and then tells her: “You just look like my mother.”
(55) It is the power of Silence’s gaze that makes her realize to what extent he has
captured her essence as a West Indian woman surviving in White-dominated England,
leading her to admit later in the play:
He had some extraordinary eyes. I felt absolutely naked … But really it was like
he could see right through you. I didn’t know what to say … He frightened me
but at the same time I felt I knew him. Still I was helpless … This is such a
funny country. You don’t ever know quite what you are … But he really did
have the most amazing eyes … (Ritual by Water 55)
3
“That second spine which is the gaze,” as Eugenio Barba puts it,1 is indeed a powerful
tool through which Edgar Nkosi White theatricalizes the complex subjectivity of the
racially oppressed. As reflected in the words quoted above, recognizing the gaze of the
oppressed or even one’s oppression through the eyes of ‘the other’ can either nullify any
attempt to speak or make speech itself an insufficient means of communication. The
peculiar power of the gaze to counteract the victimizing power of racialism is also
reflected in the eyes of an ageing West Indian character of The Nine Night, which are
“luminous and childlike” (12) and resist the sense of disappointment reflected in his
words; or, by a different token, in young Izak’s look in the same play, who is said to
have “the blood shot eyes of a raver” in which a resistant attitude towards
discrimination is contained. (7) Silence’s, Ferret’s and Izak’s eyes hence refract the
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preservation of dignity in deprived scenarios, as with the mixture of beauty and sadness
that Sparrow observes in Sharon’s gaze in Like Them That Dream: “Your eyes are the
difference between the way the world should be and the way it really is,” he says. (85)
Closely connected with this, and also very frequent in Edgar Nkosi White’s
work, are inscriptions of what could be denominated ‘seductive,’ even ‘lustful’ gazes,
with which marginalized characters momentarily acquire the status of ‘Subject’ they are
most of the time denied. Examples are found in Fun in Lethe, (76) The Wonderfull
Yeare, (205) Ritual by Water, (40, 66) Redemption Song, (32, 48, 64) The Boot Dance,
(103) and The Lovesong for Langston. (45) These intense ways of looking contribute to
a peculiar kinetics of desire and affection in Edgar Nkosi White’s theatre. Indeed, looks
of seduction in the author’s work generate, in Susan Melrose’s terms, a counteractive
“force-field” (1994: 53) that undermines the inferiorizing power of a predominant mime
of negativity and suffering. With seductive and lust-filled looks, then, sparks of life are
introduced into the playwright’s conflictive mimic designs, momentarily melting the
“frosted glass” through which people “look[-] at each other,” as a character in The
Mummer’s Play puts it. (133)
The observation of mouth movement in Edgar Nkosi White’s characters leads to
similar conclusions. Thus, half-open or widely-open lips are implicitly and explicitly
present in the dramatist’s work to convey various degrees of surprise, (The Case of Dr.
Kola 161) puzzlement, (Redemption Song 39) shock, (The Boot Dance 137) awe,
(Ritual by Water 39) or even catatonia, (The Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus 5,
1
Comment made during one of Barba’s speeches at the last International School of Theatre Anthropology
(Seville, October 2004).
4
64) which racial rejection produces in both oppressor and victim. At the same time,
though, his plays contain many examples of mouth-expression that undermine the
aforementioned dominant mime of hate and sorrow. Through them, it is again
demonstrated to what extent theatrical discourse often has, at least, one contradictory
duplicity. Thus, smiling and laughing faces abound in Edgar Nkosi White’s drama,
counterpointing the negative attitudes and feelings evoked by his characters’ looks and
reinforcing those gazes that inject degrees of counteractive force-fields. These mimic
features deserve special attention, particularly because of their important presence in the
playwright’s work in quantitative terms and also due to their highly paradoxical load.
To be sure, smiles and laughter may be deemed highly bizarre mime traits in Edgar
Nkosi White’s oeuvre if his work is perceived as consistently dramatizing racial
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oppression. Yet, a closer look at their distinct connotations provides the key to
understand their central role in the dramatist’s portrayal of racism.
Happy faces are, on the one hand, indexical signs of characterization. Hence, the
cheerful disposition of some of Edgar Nkosi White’s oppressed figures is reflected in
their smiles or sudden bursts of laughter, thereby favouring contrast to other serious or
sad-looking figures in the same play. (Dija 17; Fun in Lethe 97; The Mummer’s Play
133; The Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus 19, 36; The Crucificado 86; Lament for
Rastafari 36-7, 45, 65; Like Them That Dream 83, 92, 125; The Nine Night 11, 30;
Ritual by Water 43, 47, 50; Redemption Song 17, 41, 46; The Boot Dance 92, 130; Les
Femmes Noires 153, 165, 190; The Lovesong for Langston 45, 52; Millennium 7 279) In
addition, the smiling face of some characters may contribute to dramatic irony by
providing a clear contrast to a tragic situation. (The Boot Dance 113)
At a more symbolic level, the oppressed and, yet, smiling characters of Edgar
Nkosi White’s plays could be perceived as promoting a fossilized image of the victim of
racialism and of Black people in particular. That is to say, the numerous laughing Black
faces in his work might be read as perpetuating the stereotypical depiction of Black
people as naïve and servile, which is especially problematic if the historical background
of such an image is taken into account. The cliché of the ever-smiling Black man is
indeed one of the oldest, most widespread racist constructions. Dating back to the times
of slavery, it has strong connections with types such as that of the faithful, good
Christian slave or ‘Uncle-Tom’ type, or the caricaturesque ‘Zip Coon’ of black-face
minstrels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “The smile of the black man, the
grin,” as Frantz Fanon says, “seems to have captured the interest of a number of
5
writers.” (1986: 49) This smile has been historically interpreted, even constructed, from
the Whites’ point of view. In this vein Frantz Fanon quotes Bernard Wolfe’s thoughts:
“It pleases us to portray the Negro showing us all his teeth in a smile made for us. And
his smile as we see it −as we make it− always means a gift …” (1986: 49) This enforced
‘gift’ is still offered today through the industry of tourism and neo-colonial visions of
underdeveloped regions.
Of all Edgar Nkosi White’s plays, it is Redemption Song that more clearly
presents Black smiles as generated by a neo-colonial backdrop. The play’s protagonist,
a West Indian poet that returns to his homeland after a long exile, needs to be taught
about the servile value of smiling in the Caribbean. Thus, his father tells him,
“[s]ometimes you must grin until you can do better.” (Redemption Song 76) Similarly,
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his old friend points at his own teeth, teaching him a similar lesson: “These here so your
life preservers. Them keep you afloat. If you want to get through in this place that’s
what you have to do. Is best you learn now.” (Redemption Song 62)
Not all the smiles and laughs in Edgar Nkosi White’s work are, however,
collaborative, enslaving “gifts” to White figures. Enacted as they are in very different
contexts, most of them generate a wide range of differentiated connotations. For this
reason, their outstanding presence in the dramatist’s mimic designs does not foster the
use of a racist stereotype per se. Instead, the smiling and laughing faces of the author’s
oppressed figures reinforce the meaning of other dramaturgical elements which, as
mentioned in previous chapters, critically re-present Black people’s position of
servitude in past and present-time racist societies. As anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer
puts it:
The blacks are kept in their obsequious attitude by the extreme penalties of fear
and force, and this is common knowledge to both the whites and blacks.
Nevertheless, the whites demand that the blacks be always smiling, attentive,
and friendly in all their relationships with them … (Fanon 1986: 49-50)
Edgar Nkosi White depicts this “demand” in Millennium 7, for example, when an old
Afro-American woman called Naomi says: “They expect you to be smiling and cheerful
all the time.” (272) As reflected in Geoffrey Gorer’s thoughts, smiles are a deceptive yet
intrinsic component in the reality of White-on-Black oppression.
In this light, other complementary meanings underlying Edgar Nkosi White’s
smiling characters can be better comprehended. Thus, some of the happy-looking faces
in the playwright’s work may be also understood as reflecting a resilient disposition in
6
the face of subjugation and adversity. Langston’s face in The Lovesong for Langston is
a case in point, above all in the scene in which the poet smiles while scrubbing the
ship’s deck, confounding the Sailors with his positive attitude in such harsh conditions
and, in so doing, misleading them into thinking that he is “simple.” (21) From the
beginning of the play, however, Langston’s mother refers to her son’s capacity to
“laugh at the damnedest things.” (The Lovesong for Langston 3)
Resilient smiles become collective signs of resistance when exchanged between
members of the same community. Many of Edgar Nkosi White’s characters smile to
each other or laugh together, thereby creating strong bonds of complicity that make the
effects of racism slightly more endurable. The healing influence which laughter exerts
on marginalized groups is hence reflected in several of the author’s plays. (Fun in Lethe
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74 80-1, 83; The Wonderful Yeare 183, 185, 187, 201; The Mummer’s Play 136; The
Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus 34; The Crucificado 73, 141; That Generation
198; Ritual by Water 52, 55, 58, 60, 69; Redemption Song 45; Les Femmes Noires 163;
I, Marcus Garvey 257) All these pieces demonstrate, in the words of David Krasner, to
what extent −
[l]aughter within a group blurs self-awareness, heightening a sense of
commonality with those who partake in it. In the process, laughter secures group
solidarity … Shared laughter extinguishes an isolated existence, deepening one’s
connections and sense of common interests. (1997: 137)
Indeed, when laughter is shown to be contagious amongst Edgar Nkosi White’s
oppressed figures, the circle of isolation that alienates these characters from others is
momentarily broken, while at the same time enhancing the capacity of marginalized
figures to distance themselves from their everyday plights, as done through more
individualized forms of smiling.
In distinct dramatic circumstances, laughter may become a sign of parody
whereby the power of the oppressor is challenged or, at least, undermined. As such it is
also reflected in Edgar Nkosi White’s plays, especially every time a racially-oppressed
character mocks the racist structure either by teasing the oppressors, be they present or
not; (Segismundo’s Tricyle 146; The Burghers of Calais 5, 7; Fun in Lethe 109; The
Wonderfull Yeare 237; The Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus 61; Lament for
Rastafari 52; The Nine Night 12; Ritual by Water 42; Redemption Song 53) or by
laughing at the absurdity of his/her own subjugated position. (Fun in Lethe 79, The
Crucificado 115, Lament for Rastafari 75, Ritual by Water 41, Les Femmes Noires 158,
7
I, Marcus Garvey 269) These are partial manifestations of the “carnival laughter”
defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, which “is directed at all and everyone” (1984: 11) and with
its “gay relativity” and “ambivalence” allows the oppressed to vent their sorrows in an
act of subversive derision.
There are at least two implications attached to this type of laughter in Edgar
Nkosi White’s work. On the one hand, it undermines the subservient smile whereby, as
mentioned earlier, Black people have been stereotyped. Through parodic mime, the
smile of servitude is turned on its head, divesting the oppressors −even if only
momentarily− from a position of superiority that is taken for granted and that includes a
likeable self-image. In The Nine Night, the marginal existence of Afro-Caribbean exiles
is re-presented through Hamon’s parody of White Englishmen in the West Indies, which
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makes his old friend Ferret laugh. Hamon’s mockery alludes to physical difference
−“You know how they face get red as soon as the sun touch it?” (The Nine Night 12)−
as well as to bodily behaviour −“When the rhythm of the music start to grab him− he
jumped and tried to dance, man he look like a chicken when lighting strike it.” (The
Nine Night 12)
Hamon’s farcical representation of his oppressors and Ferret’s empathetic
response towards it, as well as the mocking attitude of other figures with regard to their
‘Others,’ illustrate at a mimic level “the double vision,” as Homi Bhabha puts it, which
menacingly results from “mimicry” −in this case understood, as this scholar does, as
“one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge.”
(1994: 85) Be they representative of (post)colonial subjects −and hence of “mimic men”
proper− or simply of Black citizens assimilated into −yet at the same time rejected by−
predominantly White societies, the mocking faces of Edgar Nkosi White’s figures
produce, resorting again to Homi Bhabha’s words, “a partial vision” of the oppressor’s
“presence,” “a gaze of otherness” whereby “the observer becomes the observed and
‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from
essence.” (1994: 88-9)
On the other hand, the parodic laughter of Edgar Nkosi White’s characters offers
them temporary protection against the double, even triple oppression that they suffer
within and without the same community as a result of their racial inferiorization. In fact,
these multiple oppressions are often expressed in the form of laughter as well. In some
cases it is the racist’s laughter; (The Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus 59; The
Crucificado 108; Like Them That Dream 112, 118; Redemption Song 34-5) in other
8
cases it is the laughter of division between members of the Black communities, who
ridicule one another, failing to recognize that the marginalization of their peers is a sign
of their own marginalization; (Lament for Rastafari 55; Man and Soul 135, Ritual by
Water 44-5; I, Marcus Garvey 239; The Lovesong for Langston 22, 41) and frequently it
is the laughter of female characters, which is presented as another sign of the Black
male’s emasculation in racist contexts. (Fun in Lethe 70, 76; The Mummer’s Play 144;
Redemption Song 21, 25, 70) All in all, these ‘other(ing)’ laughing faces contribute to
presenting the (male) victim of racial discrimination as, in Ferret’s words, “a figure of
fun.” (The Nine Night 13) At the same time, however, they are central to understanding
the complex value of their own laughing mime when parodying the multi-layered
exercise of social mockery to which they are submitted, hence becoming, for a short
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while, those who laugh longest.
Having considered the distinctive, often paradoxical meanings which intersect in
the facial expressions of Edgar Nkosi White’s figures through the axes marked by gaze
and mouth, it is possible to affirm that the essential mime of his Theatre of Oppression
conforms a polyhedric mask of ambivalence. The dramatist’s mimic designs can be
collectively regarded as a mask inasmuch as they conceal different faces behind the face
that is on display. As has been said, where facial expressions of negativity are conveyed
through the gaze, they are contradicted by the positive message of the mouth, and vice
versa. The distinct layers of expression in the mime of the oppressed actually reflect
their ‘Quest for Selfhood.’ As the protagonist of the play The Crucificado clearly
expresses it, “[their] job is finding another face inside [their] face.” (108)
On the other hand, the mimic signs in Edgar Nkosi White’s plays essentially
conform a non-verbal discourse of ambivalence by enhancing stereotypes while at the
same time subverting them, ultimately leading to inextricable contradictions that are at
the heart of the complex phenomenon of racialism. It is once more the polysemic smiles
and laughter in the author’s playtexts that dramatize such ambivalence more
vehemently. Thus, in Segismundo’s Tricycle the main character asks his Black servant,
“[w]hy aren’t you sad?” (149) −which implies at least a smiling disposition on the
servant’s part− to which the Black man replies, “I am sad,” (150) thereby eliciting a
distinct interpretation of his happy-looking face that underplays his apparently ‘natural’
optimism. Similarly, when Legion, the main character of Redemption Song is stoned to
death, a voice wonders if “[h]e laughing” while his body lies on the ground. (80) As
conveyed by Sparrow’s words in Like Them That Dream when he states that in America
9
it is “… like you smile but you don’t smile,” (115) the mimic expressivity of the
oppressed is always an appearance covering a very different signified and yet aiming at
truly experiencing what is shown on the surface −an attempt which, as with Legion’s
case, may be even sustained till the last breath. In this light other composite facial
expressions in Edgar Nkosi White’s work can be understood, such as Hilda’s recurrent
laughing face in Lament for Rastafari during her poignant soliloquy on White-on-Black
racism, ( 63-4) or Sparrow’s ‘angry’ laughter about the same reality at the end of Like
Them That Dream. (130)
As Marcel Gutwirth observes, laughter is universal but its occasion “is
rigorously circumstance- and situation-bound”; therefore, as David Krasner contends, it
“requires a knowledge of circumstances and relevancy.” (1997: 139) This thought is
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applicable to any other mimic expression. Through the myriad mimic signs which his
characters can produce, Edgar Nkosi White teaches reader and spectator about the
multiple, often devious faces of racism. As one of his marginalized figures puts it in The
Wonderfull Yeare, “[t]here are too many faces but someday, it’s got to make sense.”
(184) The playwright’s mimic designs constitute a vivid corporeal cartography in this
search for meaning, which demands further exploration.
10
Works Cited:
PRIMARY SOURCES:
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White, Edgar Nkosi. The Boot Dance. Redemption Song and Other Plays. London:
Marion Boyars, 1985. 85-143.
---. The Case of Dr. Kola. The Long and Cheerful Road to Slavery: Man and Soul, The
Case of Dr. Kola, That Generation. Lament for Rastafari and Other Plays.
London: Marion Boyars, 1983. 155-72.
---. The Crucificado. The Crucificado: Two Plays. New York NY: William and
Morrow, 1973. 67-146.
---. Dija. Scripts 10 1 (1972): 15-7.
---. Fun in Lethe. Underground: Four Plays. New York NY: William and Morrow,
1970. 57-119.
---. That Generation. The Long and Cheerful Road to Slavery: Man and Soul, The Case
of Dr. Kola, That Generation. Lament for Rastafari and Other Plays. London:
Marion Boyars, 1983. 173-207.
---. I, Marcus Garvey. Black Heroes: Seven Plays. Ed. Errol Hill. New York NY:
Applause Theatre, 1989. 205-74.
---. Lament for Rastafari. Lament for Rastafari and Other Plays. London: Marion
Boyars, 1983. 7-79.
Les
Femmes Noires. Redemption Song and Other Plays. London: Marion Boyars,
---.
1985. 145-92.
---. The Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus. The Crucificado: Two Plays. New York
NY: William and Morrow, 1973. 1-65.
---. Like Them That Dream. Lament for Rastafari and Other Plays. London: Marion
Boyars, 1983. 81-131.
---. The Lovesong for Langston. Ms. New Dramatists, New York NY, 2001.
---. Millennium 7. New Dramatists: Best Plays by the Graduating Class of 2001. Ed.
Todd London. Hanover NH: Smith and Kraus, 2002. 267-307.
---. The Mummer’s Play. Underground: Four Plays. New York NY: William and
Morrow, 1970. 121-69.
---. The Nine Night. The Nine Night and Ritual by Water. London: Methuen, 1984. 5-36.
---. Redemption Song. Redemption Song and Other Plays. London: Marion Boyars,
1985. 11-84.
---. Ritual by Water. The Nine Night. The Nine Night and Ritual by Water.London:
Methuen, 1984. 37-70.
---. Segismundo’s Tricycle. Black Review 1 (1971): 130-54.
---. The Wonderful Yeare. Underground: Four Plays. New York NY: William and
Morrow, 1970. 171-245.
SECONDARY SOURCES:
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1968. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington
IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
11
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markman. London:
Pluto Press, 1986.
Kowzan, Tadeusz. Literatura y Espectáculo. 1970. Trans. Manuel García Martínez.
Madrid: Taurus, 1992.
Krasner, David. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American
Theatre, 1895-1910. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997.
Melrose, Susan. A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text. London: Macmillan, 1994.
Ubersfeld, Anne. La escuela del espectador. 1981. Trans. Silvia Ramos. Madrid:
Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España, 1997.
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12
Writing Citizens: Teaching Writing and
Performing Citizenship in Lebanon
When I first moved to Lebanon in the fall of 2005, six months after the
massive protests of the so-called ‘Beirut Spring’ that led to the withdrawal of
Syria, there was a sense of hope among the people, albeit tinged with
apprehension. It was often mentioned to me that the events earlier in the
year, when people gathered together in Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut
and called for Lebanese independence and sovereignty, had been
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exceptional for the fact that so many people from different communities had
willingly identified themselves primarily as Lebanese. Was this an original
moment of unity for a new Lebanon? Not quite. Even at the time there were
counter-protests in another square nearby. And two years later these cracks
have forked and opened wide: the governing institutions of the country are
divided in two and unable to come to an agreement, and the people are
either polarized along the same lines as their leaders, or lost in the middle.
In general, people feel disillusioned as public discourse and public space
seem to be sites only of perpetually reiterated disagreement and division.
In need of a topic for a writing course, I decided to take up some of these
issues by designing a course that focuses on the construction and use of
public space in Lebanon, and in particular on the reconstruction of Martyrs’
Square, the public square at the heart of Beirut that figured so prominently
in the events of early 2005. As a non-sectarian, central area, the square was
on the Green Line between east and west Beirut during the war, and the
scene of fierce fighting; its reconstruction may be seen as an attempt give
back to the nation a space in which people may encounter one another as
citizens, and in so doing, cross religious, gender and class boundaries. In
designing the course, I thought public space seemed to have a lot to offer as
a site for deterritorialized encounters with, and negotiations of, difference.
By contrast, since the course was designed to prepare students for academic
and professional writing, public discourse figured as a territorialized space
that required adherence to certain disciplinary norms and conventions.
J. Hall
DRAFT
With this apparent difference in mind, it seemed worthwhile to reflect on
how the metaphors of text as space and space as text might be read back into
each other. How do territorializing elements such as borders, normative
categories, and disciplinary conventions enable or disable the production of
identities? Does the production of the citizen require the transcendence of
such borders, categories, and conventions?
The paper proceeds by examining ways in which certain public texts
materialize the citizen in Lebanon. Through my reading of the Constitution
and Martyrs’ Square as public texts, I argue that recognizing the
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performative dimensions of these texts enables an understanding of how
they function not as open spaces in which representation occurs, but as
spaces with disciplinary and normative dimensions that both constrain and
enable representation. Rather than viewing the texts as an expression of the
abstract citizen, or as open spaces in which citizens may express themselves,
I want to examine how these public texts materialize citizens, particularly
through performative iterations of normative abstractions—an approach that
is indebted to Judith Butler’s account of the process of materialization in
Bodies that Matter.
Constitutive Exclusions: The Constitution, the Borders, and the Citizen
In this section I want to argue that the formation of the modern nation-state
is dependent on the imbrication of discourse and materiality, but not
through a naming process whereby a certain material reality is recognized
and named. Following Butler’s logic in Bodies that Matter, I claim that a
modern nation-state such as Lebanon is not formed through such a
referential structure—as form imposed on formless matter—but rather it is
materialized via exclusions and performative gestures. The first two chapters
of the Lebanese Constitution in which the borders are declared and certain
people within those borders are granted the rights and responsibilities of
citizens will be the focus of my argument.
2
J. Hall
DRAFT
Lebanon came into being as a modern nation-state with the demise of the
Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Under the 1916 Sykes-Picot
agreement, a joint French and British plan to divide up the region, the large
Ottoman administrative region of Mt Lebanon and contiguous Ottoman
cazas to the north, east and south were put together to form Greater
Lebanon. The Constitution, which was ratified in 1926, opens by naming
this territory and its borders:
Article 1. article 1)
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(as modified by the constitutional law of 9 November 1943,
Lebanon is an independent State, unitarian and sovereign. Its
frontiers are those which now limit it:
48
IN THE NORTH: from the mouth of Nahr El Kebir, the line
following the course of this river up to its junction with its tributary the
Ouade Khaled at the height of Jisr El Kamar.
IN THE EAST: the top line separating the valleys of Ouade Khaled
and the Ouade Nahr-El Assi (Orontes) and passing through the villages of
Meayssra, Harbaana, Hait, Ebbech, Faissan, at the height of the villages
Brifa and Matrebeh. This line follows the northern limit of the caza of
Baalbeck, towards the Northeast and Southeast, then the Eastern limits of
the cazas of Baalbeck, Bekaa, Hasbaya and Rashaya.
IN THE SOUTH: the present southern limits of the cazas of Tyre
and Marjeyoun.
IN THE WEST: the Mediterranean Sea. (‘The Lebanese
Constitution’)
What interests me about these borders is that they raise the question of
what formations precede the nation-state in that the borders depend on the
imbrication of natural land formations with ancient village communities and
the political formations constructed under Ottoman rule. The western
border is the sea; the northern border runs along a river; the eastern border
runs along a mountain ridge dividing two valleys, through several ridge-top
villages, and then follows the borders of the Ottoman cazas all the way
round to the south and back to the sea. In this description the line runs its
3
J. Hall
DRAFT
way swiftly and neatly along and through natural, communal and political
formations, ‘following the course of,’ ‘passing through,’ and then ‘following
the limits of’. The drawing of borders must take into account—or not take
into account, as the case may be—natural borders, existing borders of local
communities, and existing political borders.
But the drawing of any border creates anomalies of exclusion and inclusion.
The case of the Sheba’a farms in the southeastern corner of Lebanon has
recently highlighted the problems of constituting borders, while also
pointing to the abjection of those who live in the borderlands. The village of
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Sheba’a lies within Lebanon, but its residents own farmland that falls within
Syria according to the 1923 delineation of the border. Through the 1920s
and 1930s some farmers of this land ignored its location on the Syrian side
of the officially delineated border by paying taxes within Lebanon and
conducting their legal and administrative business in the Lebanese regional
centers of Marjayoun and Hasbaya. Successive recommendations to amend
the border to account for its anomalous relation to the existing borders of
the community of Sheba’a were ignored (Kaufman). Although these people
recognized Lebanese authority it
seems it did not recognize them.
Thus the interpellation of these
border farmers as citizens is an
interesting case in which they turned
to acknowledge the authority of the
state but the state paid them little
heed. The border between Lebanon
and Syria was never properly
surveyed or physically demarcated
following its original delineation in
1923 (Kaufman)
Sheba’a Farms
Source: www.inbaa.com
4
J. Hall
DRAFT
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A security post overlooking the border area
Source: polosbastards.com
50
With the withdrawal of Israel from south Lebanon in
2000 the case of Sheba’a farms suddenly came to
matter. If the land were Lebanese then the
withdrawal would not be complete. Israeli
occupation of the Sheba’a farms became a key plank
in Hizbullah’s self-justification as an armed
resistance movement, and political actors of all
stripes became interested in the status of the farms.
Bewilderingly the farming community of Sheba’a moved, at least in a
discursive sense, from not mattering at all to mattering a lot. But their
significance ramifies more on the national and international level than it
does on the mundane level of whether they can farm their land or not, or
whether they can make political claims. The case of the Sheba’a farms has
been represented globally, particularly in explanations of the July 2006 war,
yet the plight of the people there is not what matters in these accounts.
I am using this example to suggest that there is a constitutive failure of
representation to capture its object that remains unavoidable. Whether it is
unrepresented, misrepresented, under-represented or over-represented, the
case of the Sheba’a farms eludes the material existence of the farms and the
farming community that used to live off them. There seem to be two
possible responses to this constitutive failure: the first is to improve the
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precision and inclusiveness of the mechanism of representation, amending
misrepresentation through greater accuracy, or amending exclusion through
greater openness and expansion; the second is to declare a reality that lies
beyond the reach of representation. These two approaches are misleading
because of their misunderstanding of borders. The first claims to be able to
overcome all borders; the second claims to know where the border between
discourse and materiality lies. We inhabit bordered territory, the edges of
which we cannot know. To know these borders would involve the
impossible act of naming what lies outside of discourse. Essentially I will be
arguing that there is nothing in the political field beyond the processes of
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identification, representation and recognition, which means that those
processes are not primarily descriptive of an extra-discursive reality.
Undergirding this is Butler’s contention that materiality and language are,
for us, always already mutually embedded:
language and materiality are fully embedded in each other, chiasmic in their
interdependency, but never fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced to
one another, and yet neither fully ever exceeds the other. Always already
implicated in each other, always already exceeding one another, language
and materiality are never fully identical nor fully different. (Bodies 69)
Materializing citizens then is neither a descriptive process of naming what is
there, nor a process of ascribing a name to a nameless natural body. In the
case of citizenship, evidently language cannot be cast as that which saves
materiality from not mattering by making it matter. There is no way of
understanding the relationship between materiality and language in terms of
total inclusion, or total identification of one with the other. But there is also
no way of understanding them outside of each other. Exclusions, for Butler,
thereby become constitutive and internal.
Pheng Cheah, in her critique of Butler, suggests that some communities
have needs, such as hunger, that fall outside of the problems of
identification and representation. Cheah argues against ‘identification as a
paradigm of oppression,’ suggesting that it ignores materiality in its
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dependence on particularly modern ideational and national structures (12021). By reaffirming a nature/culture dichotomy through emphasizing the
priority of discourse over materiality, Butler, according to Cheah, fails to
adequately address the situation of ‘global neocolonialism where oppression
occurs at a physical level’ (121). But in her discussion of hunger Cheah
demonstrates the inescapability of discursive processes by using metaphors
from the realm of tekhne: ‘tracings of the digestive tract’ and ‘the weaving of
the body’ (my emphasis, 120-21). Even hunger has to be made intelligible
and takes its place within a global system of distribution and exchange value.
This may be a contradiction which Cheah is happy to embrace as she argues
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for a dynamic, deconstructive understanding of nature and culture, as
opposed to Butler’s insistence on constitutive exclusion. However, what
Butler’s emphasis on exclusion achieves is deeper understanding of the
contingency of the signifier, such that representation is not deemed to be
salvation by inclusion, and identification is seen as both oppressive and
emancipatory. Cheah, by contrast, seems to hold on to the notion that those
who have been marginalized by the colonial and neocolonial subdivisions of
the world should somehow be acknowledged as unintelligible to resist simply
drawing them into the ‘global neocolonial’ grid. She seems to reach, in
other words, for a more just and liberating form of (non)representation,
whereby things remain in their concrete particularity.
Cheah’s critique of Butler is a significant attempt to understand the
situation of people such as the residents of Sheba’a in ways that do not
assume that the question was always already political in the sense that it is
today. That is, she aims for a historicism that would avoid what she sees as a
universal formalism in Butler’s approach. For the residents of Sheba’a, what
preceded the demand for identification within ‘the constitutional nationstate form’ (121)? Before the nation-state the people of Sheba’a had the
hierarchies of the family and the village, demarcated farmlands, property
ownership, taxes, administrative centers, religion, named hillsides and
valleys—in other words, all manner of formations within which identities
were produced and recognized. The formation of political abstractions from
concrete particulars and, in the other direction, the use of political
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abstractions to identify those concrete particulars was always already in play,
and it is this that Butler wants to emphasize rather than the more historical
question pursued by Cheah of the degree of importance of the abstract and
the concrete. In defending universality as ‘understood in terms of
theoretical formalism’ (Butler et al. 18), she takes her cue from Hegel in
insisting on the mutual interdependence of the abstract and the concrete,
such that they betray traces of each other: ‘In other words, abstraction
cannot remain rigorously abstract without exhibiting something of what it
must exclude in order to constitute itself as abstraction’ (19).
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This question of what is prior to the abstract identifications and delineations
of the Constitution will remain with us as we turn to look at the second
chapter of the Constitution. I want to read this chapter as materializing the
citizen through performative citation of abstractions such as freedom and
equality. As a definition of the Lebanese national, it endows the Lebanese
people with equality (Articles 7 and 12), liberty (Articles 8, 9, 10, and 13) and
the right to private property (Articles 14 and 15).
CHAPTER 2. - THE LEBANESE NATIONALS, THEIR RIGHTS AND
THEIR DUTIES
Article 6. -
The Lebanese nationality, the way it is acquired, is retained
and forfeited, shall be determined by law.
Article 7. -
All the Lebanese are equal before the law. They enjoy equal
civil and political rights and are equally subjected to public charges and
duties, without any distinction whatever.
Article 8. -
Individual liberty is guaranteed and protected. No one can be
arrested or detained except in accordance with the provisions of the law. No
infringements and no sanctions can be established except by law.
Article 9. -
Liberty of conscience is absolute. By rendering homage to the
Almighty, the State respects all creeds and guarantees and protects their
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free exercise, on condition that they do not interfere with public order. It
also guarantees to individuals, whatever their religious allegiance, the
respect of their personal status and their religious interests.
Article 10. -
Education is free so long as it is not contrary to public order
and to good manners and does not touch the dignity of creeds. No
derogation shall affect the right of communities to have their schools,
subject to the general prescriptions on public education edicted by the
State.
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Article 11. -
(As modified by the constitutional law of 9 November 1943,
article 2). Arabic is the official national language. A law shall determine the
cases where the French language is to be used.
Article 12. -
All Lebanese citizens are equally admitted to all public
functions without any other cause for preference except their merit and
competence and according to the conditions set by law. A special statute
shall govern Civil Servants according to the administrations to which they
belong.
Article 13. -
Freedom of expression by word or pen, freedom of the press,
freedom of holding meetings and freedom of association are equally
guaranteed within the framework of the law.
Article 14. -
Domicile is unviolable. None can enter it except in cases
provided by the law and according to the form it prescribes.
Article 15. -
Property is under the protection of the law. None may be
deprived of his property except for public utility, in cases established by the
law and in return of prior and fair compensation. (‘The Lebanese
Constitution’)
I want to read the Constitution as a performative utterance, following the
famous readings by Arendt and Derrida of the Declaration of Independence
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(Honig). Under such a reading, the question of what is prior to the
Constitution is the key problem: who claims the authority to speak this
constitutive utterance? Of course, in the ideal case the answer is the people:
the citizens authorize their own constitution, speaking themselves into
existence. Constitutions are thus performative utterances that bring about a
state of affairs rather than refer to a state of affairs. But as Derrida points
out, there remains a demand for authority prior to the constitution, a
demand that can never be fulfilled but which must nonetheless be
addressed. The US Declaration of Independence addressed this demand
through constative gestures toward a pre-existent ground by invoking
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‘Nature and Nature’s God.’ In the case of the Lebanese Constitution,
however, its performativity does not need to try to find constative ground
because it can seek prior authority through being a citation of other national
constitutions. It gains its stability and authority through the citation of
previous declarations of equality and liberty.
However, even as it cites abstract endowments of the citizen such as equality
and liberty it cannot do so in purely abstract terms. This section of the
constitution not only performs the hermeneutic work of ascribing the
meaning citizen to certain people within a certain bounded space, but in
doing so it materializes the citizen, regulating bodies and performing
exclusions. We can see traces of real bodies and people’s actual material,
embodied existence in the mention of arrest and detention, public order,
the freedom of association, the inviolability of the citizen’s home, and the
right to hold property. To return to Butler’s argument in Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality, ‘Abstraction is thus contaminated precisely by the
concretion from which it seeks to differentiate itself’ (19). So the process of
differentiation cannot be excluded. We can see immediately how certain
bodies, even though they inhabit the specified territory, are, to use Judith
Butler’s pun, bodies that do not matter—bodies that have no meaning, or at
least, in this context, do not bear the meaning citizen. The references to the
material existence of embodied subjects seem to imply a masculine subject
who behaves or misbehaves publicly, who is the head of the house, and who
owns property. Women, foreign workers, children and animals are bodies
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that do not matter in the same way. Abstract and immaterial though it seems
to be, the constitution materializes those bodies differently.
But this is not to claim that there is something wrong with the abstract
account of the citizen given in the constitution. Writing a constitution that
avoids universalizing abstractions and exhaustively and descriptively
performs the inclusion of every particular identity is not the solution.
Indeed, such a constitution would inevitably legitimize and reify certain
identities and not others in ethically and politically problematic ways, and
would of course fix in place certain exclusions. As Butler suggests,
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descriptivism runs counter to radical democracy as it forecloses identities.
By contrast, using terms such as ‘woman’—and in this case ‘freedom,’
‘equality,’ and ‘citizen’—non-descriptively keeps the category open ‘as a site
of permanent political contest’ (222). Abstractions in themselves are not the
problem then; indeed, abstractions so long as they can be continually recast
through performative reiterations enable a dynamic form of exclusion that is
ethically and politically enabling. In a 1998 interview, Butler makes two
points about ‘essence’: first, it is opposed to appearance so strictly speaking
it is that which never appears; second, it is essential, a precondition, or a
‘that without which’ (Cheah, ‘Future’ 22). Freedom and equality have such
status in the Constitution: they depend on the contamination of the abstract
by the concrete, or of essence by appearance; and, as preconditions to their
own realization, they cannot be named but must be performatively
inaugurated. ‘This form of political performativity does not retroactively
absolutize its own claim, but recites and restages a set of cultural norms that
displace legitimacy from a presumed authority to the mechanism of its
renewal’ (Butler et al. 41). The performative operations of the Constitution
that materialize the citizen depend on being a reiteration of such normative
political categories. As such a reiteration, there is the possibility of those
categories becoming, in Butler’s words, ‘more dynamic, more open, and less
permanent’ (Bodies 189). The paradox of the claim to universality being
dependent on constitutive exclusions not only remains but it becomes vital
to political contestation (109).
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Exclusions such as this, or the production of an ‘outside,’ may be
constitutive, but for Butler that does not mean that exclusions become
merely ‘sad necessities of signification.’ Instead:
The task is to refigure the outside as a future horizon, one in which the
violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of
equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse
meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in any given truth
regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and
unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of
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that normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to
represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. In
this sense, radical and inclusive representability is not precisely the goal: to
include, to speak as, to bring in every marginal and excluded position within
a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its limits
nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference. If there is a
violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation
might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending,
without mastering, to own—and yet never fully to own—the exclusions by
which we proceed. (Bodies 53)
If texts such as the Constitution, which delineate the borders and normative
values that constitute the public, operate performatively, then the public
cannot be viewed as a self-identical entity that is constituted by a plurality of
self-identical communities and individuals. In other words, it cannot be
represented. Nor can its constituent parts represent themselves or be
represented. If the public cannot be captured by representation, that is not
because it is fixed as the unspeakable outside of discourse. It is rather
because the public is neither separate from its representation nor reducible
to it. Any attempt to represent the public is both dynamic and incomplete.
This is significant as we turn to look at public space and material rhetoric
because it warns us against imagining public space as open and transparent
space in which the public may express itself.
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Public Space and Material Rhetoric: Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’
Monument
I want to turn now to Martyrs Square and the monument that sits in the
square, and to read them as public texts that materialize the citizen, much
like the Constitution, through certain normative procedures of exclusion
and performative iteration. I will argue in particular against reading this
public space and its monument as though they are sites of constative
utterances, or sites in which ready-made identities circulate and encounter
one another.
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The impossibility of representing the public has two important implications
for my exploration of the role of Martyrs’ Square in Lebanese public life.
First, the problem of representing the body politic is not overcome simply
by gathering all its constituent bodies in one place. As Clive Barnett argues,
a ‘post-foundational understanding of democracy depends on abandoning
the normative presumption that the public refers to a self-identical collective
subject that could be made present in a space of assembly’ (Barnett 188).
Second, emphasizing the reiterative processes at play in the production of
the public means that public space should not be conceived only in spatial
terms, but should also be given a temporal dimension.
The significance of this for Lebanon is that it may then be possible to
question the idea that liberal humanism, through enlightened mechanisms
such as the Constitution and cosmopolitan public spaces, can unite the
diverse nation. I do not mean by this to reject national constitutions and the
enshrining of certain values in such documents, nor to repudiate the
significance of public space in fostering democracy. I do mean to suggest
that those instruments should not be seen as producing unity by
transcending difference since those instruments materialize bodies—a
necessarily differential process. Both the farmers of Sheba’a and the
definition of the Lebanese citizen demonstrate that citizenship is not
distributed transparently and equally throughout the territory of Lebanon.
Equally, public space is not an open, level field where a thousand
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democratic flowers can bloom free of processes of differentiation and
exclusion. Indeed, if the process of exclusion is constitutive of identity then
it cannot be overcome. The total inclusion implied in the notion of uniting a
diverse nation becomes deeply questionable. Under what and whose terms
is this unity to be conceived? Incompleteness in the representation of the
public becomes then paradoxically constitutive of democracy (Bodies 221).
In refusing the idea that pluralism is the dynamic interaction of a set of
ready-made identities Butler resists purely spatial metaphors to describe the
political field or arena. While she often uses spatial metaphors in conceiving
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of politics as made up of ‘domains,’ ‘sites,’ and ‘zones’ (114), she rejects
spatial metaphors such as substitution and position that emphasize location
(118). She prefers instead spatial metaphors that carry more temporality and
movement such as ‘tracing’ and ‘map of future community’ (119), in order to
conceive of ‘a dynamic map of power in which identities are constituted,
and/or erased, deployed and/or paralyzed’ (117). One can see in this the
spatio-temporal dimensions of Derrida’s endless deferring/differing. For
Butler, it is important to avoid conceiving of political terrain as space in
which identity positions are staked out with the only possibility for the
future being the inclusion of yet more identity positions. This is a
conception that I also want to resist in the following examination of the
square at the center of the Lebanese capital.
Martyrs’ Square pre-1975
Source: almashriq.hiof.no
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Martyrs’ Square post-1990
Protest in Martyrs’ Square: 14 March 2005
Source: azar.yvod.com
Source: smh.com.au
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Martyrs’ Square shot to global prominence in early 2005 with the massive
anti-Syrian protest that followed the assassination of former Prime Minister
Rafiq Hariri. The sheer weight of numbers gathered in the square that day
put intolerable pressure on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. Estimates vary
between three quarters of a million and a million, but in either case, close to
a quarter of the nation was present in the square and its surrounding area.
For many Lebanese, a gathering of this size that included so many different
confessional groups was a powerful expression of so many long-held hopes
for an end to sectarianism and violence. That the protest took place in a
public square that was destroyed by the 1975-1990 war—during which
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Martyrs’ Square had marked the Green Line between east and west Beirut—
made these emotions all the more palpable. It is tempting to see these two
squares in terms of a substitution—the square of democratic community
replaces the square of sectarian violence—that sets up two mutually opposed
possibilities: either public space is a space of unity or it is a space of
division. This, I argue, is what happens if we see what happens in public
space as an expression of something else that is fully constituted elsewhere,
i.e. if we read it metaphorically rather than metonymically. Against this, I
want to propose that we see public space as a contact zone that enables both
integration and segregation, communication and violence, and further, that
it is not a space in which integration and segregation are re-presented, so
much as where they are enacted.
Let me give an example by which to consider how the square might be
conceived in terms of metaphor and substitution, on the one hand, and in
terms of metonymy and association, on the other. Yussef Bazzi, a poet and
journalist, gave this description of the March 14 demonstration.
With breathtaking speed, Martyrs Square had reclaimed its forgotten role: a
place of meeting, continuity and community. In a single moment it had
shrugged off its emptiness and separateness, becoming a place of new
symbols in harmony with the symbols of the past and the rebirths of history.
(Bazzi)
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Bazzi begins and ends with relatively metonymical terms to describe the
square, ‘meeting’ and ‘history.’ In between, however, is the more
metaphorical notion of the square as ‘a place of new symbols.’ Two years on,
it is easy to see that there is something wrong with this vision as the country
is divided and the square has been used and reused to demonstrate those
divisions. But it is not enough to dismiss Bazzi’s description for its idealism.
Surely we cannot dispense with terms such as meeting, continuity,
community and harmony, and the sense of togetherness all of these imply. I
want to suggest that the problem with this vision is not the ideals themselves
so much as the place they are given within a representational structure in
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which the square seems able to take on these new meanings so easily. In
Bazzi’s account, it can forget itself, it can be reclaimed, it can shrug off
previous incarnations, it can become a pure site for new symbols, it can be
perpetually reborn anew. This seems to be a strange way to refer to a space
over which so many layers of history have been written. Ideals can be
metaphorically represented by the square in a way that seems to involve
little contact with the material existence of the square. The square seems to
slip from one role to another without being itself affected, without carrying
any residue with it, or perhaps more aptly, without carrying any scars.
Rather than imagining that the square can be made to represent in some
pure way a pre-existing communal or public reality, it would be more
productive to see the square as the site for performative gestures that
actually bring the community or the public into existence; and further, to
see it as a site that bears the inscriptions of previous public activity, from
political protest, to commerce, leisure, and violence. In this view, the square
is always a space constituted by borders and exclusions; it is always a space
in which encounters make people vulnerable. These are the constitutive
conditions of it as a space of democratic contestation.
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Martyrs’ Statue
Source: almashriq.hiof.no
Martyrs’ Square was named for the political activists who were executed by
the Ottomans during World War I for seeking support from the French to
resist Ottoman rule. They were publicly hanged in the square in 1915 and
1916. The first monument to commemorate their martyrdom was a white
marble sculpture of two women, one Muslim and the other Christian, facing
each other and reaching out to hold one another’s hands. Although they
were highly abstracted figures, they needed to bear obvious sectarian
markings in order to represent the transcendence of sectarian division,
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paradoxically enshrining sectarianism in the process of trying to overcome
it. When the sculpture was replaced in the early 1950s, a set of four figures
in more realistic poses and with more realistic features was put in its place
(Khalaf 191). The Italian sculptor who received the commission went to great
pains to represent the Lebanese body politic in the bodies of the four
figures by photographing people from all over Lebanon and by using live
models. In this respect, the statue is more realist than symbolic, and more
metonymical than metaphorical. But the statue is not consistently and
thoroughly realist. The two fallen figures, both men, are more realistic in
their pose and their dress than the two standing figures, though without any
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sectarian markings. They appear to represent the martyrs, suffering and
appealing to be heard. The two standing figures seem to symbolize a more
abstract set of ideas to do with the classical citizen: freedom, equality,
wisdom, truth, and hope. There is a distinct classicism in the form of their
bodies. The standing male is almost entirely naked, wearing only a small
loin-cloth. He is muscular. He is evidently the citizen whose body can
defend the nation. But he is an abstracted, universalized citizen rather than
a depiction of one of the martyrs executed by the Ottomans in 1915 and
1916. The woman is also classically depicted. She wears a long, loose-fitting
dress with a flowing shawl and holds a torch aloft in her right hand.
Strongly reinforcing this lack of realism, the woman is much taller than the
man. She is not a real woman. She is a goddess-figure. Maternal perhaps,
but far too young to actually be the mother of the man beside her. Unlike
the man alongside her, she is a symbol not a citizen. She is a metaphor and
he is a synecdoche. Her body materializes immaterial concepts such as
freedom, equality, justice, wisdom; his body materializes other bodies, the
people, the citizens of the nation.
But the Martyrs’ Square statue, which was designed to represent a nonsectarian citizen, suffered from over-exposure to sectarian violence.
Throughout the 1975-1990 war the statue stood motionless in the center of
the square as everything around it was gradually destroyed. The bodies of
the four figures were ripped through with bullets, and the standing man lost
his left arm. When the statue was eventually removed from the square for
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restoration, a decision was taken to keep these wounds as a testament to the
war. Now the archetypal citizen is severely wounded. The woman holding
the torch aloft is also riddled with bullet holes. The meaning of the statue
has shifted as a result of its exposure to the war. It no longer asserts a
unified Lebanese citizenry, free and hopeful, with quite the same
confidence. Yet for that very reason it has become all the more relevant.
Elizabeth Kassab, writing of the experience of living in Beirut during the
war, tells of the burden carried by a body that is under perpetual threat of
violence:
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The body suddenly becomes a fragile and cumbersome load, its integrity
constantly threatened. […] In Beirut one develops particular body images.
The frequent sight of mutilated bodies and the permanent fear for one’s
physical security give rise to images of one’s own mutilated body or of those
of loved ones. (Kassab)
The wounded bodies of the martyrs keep these images in circulation. What
is more, the wounds place these figures more firmly in a metonymical rather
than metaphorical relation to the public. The citizen does not merely
exemplify a set of classically defined virtues; the citizen is also in potentially
dangerous contact with others. The wounded citizen on the monument
suggests that the square is precariously poised between being a site on
which citizens encounter one another peacefully to constitute the
democratic republic or a site on which they encounter one another violently.
To be a citizen is to become vulnerable; indeed, both democracy and
violence come about through a mutual vulnerability.
In Precarious Life, Butler argues that our public exposure to each other
involves a dispossession of the self at the hands of normative aspirations.
This makes for a kind of normativity that serves as a pre-condition of a
politically useful vulnerability, rather than merely an oppressive formation
that must be escaped or dismantled. This normativity dispossesses us of our
self-identifications, opening us up to ‘the world of others.’
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But is there another normative aspiration that we must also seek to
articulate and defend? Is there a way in which the place of the body, and the
way in which it disposes us outside ourselves or sets us beside ourselves,
opens up another kind of normative aspiration within the field of politics?
The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh
expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and
bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as
well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies
for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its
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invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the
public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the
world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of
social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body
as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. (Precarious Life 26)
This dispossession is crucial to acknowledging one’s own contingency and
‘the contingency of the political signifier’ (Bodies 222). However, this
contingency does not imply that identities, citizens, and nations can simply
be rewritten. It is not a contingency that is mastered by the subject. To
return to the writing course that I mentioned in the introduction, using
writing as a metaphor for thinking about public space should lead not only
towards rewriting space and the identities that inhabit that space, but also
towards recognizing that writing requires exclusions and constraints and
that any rewriting is constituted by such exclusions and constraints, so it
cannot aim to eliminate them. Using public space as a metaphor for writing,
meanwhile, enables the recognition of the performative dimensions of
writing. Writing should not be seen as an expression of some pre-conceived
identity or state of affairs, but as the inauguration of that identity or state of
affairs through the reiteration of certain publicly constituted norms. Public
space and public discourse are not then stages on which identities are
expressed or asserted; they are rather spaces in which communicative
activity brings identities into vulnerable, negotiated existence.
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Works Cited
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162&cont=1229&lingua=en>
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London:
Routledge, 1993.
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–––. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso,
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Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony,
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‘The Lebanese Constitution.’ 23 May 1926. Trans. by Gabriel M. Bustros.
1973. Constitutional Court. 22 February 2007.
<http://www.concourt.am/wwconst/constit/lebanon/lebann-e.htm>
Meijer, Irene Costera and Baukje Prins. ‘How Bodies Come to Matter: An
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J. Hall
DRAFT
Interview with Judith Butler.’ Signs 23.2 (1998): 275-286.
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23
Wojciech Kalaga
The Third of the Body
(a pre-final version which still needs some rhetorical and stylistic care)
What I mean by the Third in the following discussion is a category emerging
from the encounter of the same and the other – the encounter all too frequently leaving
out an undefined space of the inbetween. Otherness, one of the key concepts of the contemporary discourse of the humanities, relies on the principle of tertium not datur, the
excluded middle, which leaves no realm beyond the binary. The origin of this exclusion
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is rooted in what generally might be called a rationalist stance: from Descartes to structuralism, for which the binary opposition was the basis of defining linguistic and cultural reality. Even though, despite the demise of structuralism itself, binary thinking still
persists and dominates, manifestations of the Third can be observed in some areas of
modern thought alongside tendencies towards binarism. One of such manifestations –
surprisingly, a rationalist one – is Peirce’s concept of Thirdness as synthesis or law
(having its distant predecessor in the Hegelian Aufhebung). Another is Bakhtin’s
chronotopos, as the third of space and time. In poststructuralist (or prepoststructuralist1) thought, the Third reveals itself in such concepts as Kristeva’s prelinguistic semiotics and her use of chora, in Deleuzian notions of pure game and the
fold, or in Derrida’s différance and supplement as a surplus of meaning. A more obvious
manifestation of the Third is the idea of hybridity frequently foregrounded in the postmodern/poststructuralist discourse.
In short, the Third, in a fuzzy, nebulous form, occupies the place both overlapping and bracketting binaries. It is in this context and this mode that I want to take up
the question of the body, its other and the third that emerges from their encounter. The
approach adopted in my argument is not that of “objectifying” the body as a matter
separate, or even alien to the mind, but rather a hermeneutics of the lived body, including the (inter-)subjective experience.
The body, in the let’s say Cartesian or classical framework, defines itself within
the dichotomy inside – outside. A strong impulse to overcome that dichotomy comes
1
I am using this word to refer to ides chronologically placed in structuralism, but conceptually breaking
away with its logic.
2
from the feminist rethinking of the body, and more specifically of the “rethinking the
relations between the inside and the outside of the subject […] by showing […] the torsion of the one into another, the passsage vector or uncontrollable drift of the inside into
the outside and the outside into the inside.” (Grosz 1994: xii) The feminist objective,
generally speaking, is “to reclaim the body from the realms of immanence and biology
in order tosee it as a psycho-social product.” (Grosz 1999: 270) While leaving aside the
ideological and political aspect of the the feminist critique of the body, I will consider
their claims and explorations on the one hand as a significant contribution and, on the
other hand, as a manifestation of the tendency in contemporary discourse toward towards a “non-dichotomous understanding of the body” (Grosz 1994: 21), and towards
overcoming and questioning the body’s immanence.
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Within the poststructuralist/postmodernist paradigm, rather than of bodily states
of affairs defined by the clear cut inside/outside dichotomy, we should speak of proceses
of internalization and externalization – processes which tend towards their goal (and are
thus teleological processes) but never fully succed. Externalization and internalization –
and not the stabililizing categories of the inside and the outside – are the two types of
the dynamics of the body’s interaction with the world. The externalized always retains
an element of sameness with the body, and the internalized retains a moment of otherness. It is at this junction that the Third appears. Yet, rather than in terms of the processes leading to its emergence – while keeping in mind its ever dynamic quality – it
seems more productive, because more directly related to the present cultural discourse,
to analyse the Third in terms of the lived experience of boundary overlap. I will, therefore, concentrate on three of its most pervasive manifestations: the pro-ject, the ab-ject
and the in/ter-ject.
Pro-ject
The lived body is not confined to to the anatomical flesh, clearly separated from
its outside – the realm of otherness – but encompasses what has been variously been
called phenomenal body, body image or gestallt, the imaginary body, the corporeal
schema or the body schema (cf. Gatens 1999: 231; Grosz 1994; Gallagher and Cole
1998), or what from a more generalizing perspective can be seen as a manifestation of
the body’s Third. The idea goes back to Henry Head’s notion of “postural schema,” or
3
“postural model” of the body: “It is to the existence of these ‘schemata’ that we owe the
power of projecting our recognition of posture, movement, and locality beyond the limits of our own bodies to the end of some instrument held in the hand. […] Anything
which participates in the conscious movement of our bodies is added to the model of
ourselves and becomes part of these schemata.” (Head and Holmes 1911: 188; quoted in
Grosz 1994: 66, emphasis mine). In other words, the subject’s corporeal experience and
awareness reaches beyond the limits defined by physical boundaries. An effectual and
appealing example of this transgression is the so-called phantom limb, the term (coined
by a physician S. Weir Mitchell) describing the phenomenal experience of a limb that
has in some way been severed, but remains a source of pain.
The quasi-presence of a phantom limb is only an emblematic manifestation of a
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more obvious presence – a corporeal transgression which, however, does not take on
physical or corporeal substance, but which is still lived as part of corporeal experience.
Especially valuable and relevant to the question of body boundaries – or, more exactly,
questioning the definitive binarity of the inside-outside dichotomy with reference to the
experience of body limits – is the work of Elizabeth Grosz, who questions the longestablished interpretation of the phantom limb experience. Contrary to traditional psychology, to which the phantom limb is a memory, Grosz follows the neurophysiologist
Paul Schilder in treating the phantom limb as a (deficient) part of the body image and
one of the proofs of the validity of this concept: “The phantom limb is not a memory or
an image (of something now absent). It is ‘quasi-present.’ It is the refusal of an experience to enter into the past; it illustrates the tenacity of a present that remains immutable.” (Grosz 1994: 89).
Following Schilder’s early and more recent research, and also relating to the
work of Lacan on the early stages of infant’s development, Grosz questions the selfperception of the body as defined by anatomical limits: “The limits or the borders of the
body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical ‘container,’ the skin.
The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges and contours are
‘osmotic’ – they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and
inside in an ongoing interchange.” (Grosz 1994: 79) She also discerns a similar transgression of bodily confinement in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of those
philosophers who persisted in subverting, or as we might say today, deconstructing the
polarizing binarism of dichotomous thinking. As Grosz observes, Merleau-Ponty “af-
4
firms Schilder’s notion of the plasticity of the body image, adding to it the philosophical
idea of the body image’s crucial function in establishing the lived space and time of the
subject.” (Grosz 1994: 91) Body image thus mediates between consciousness and space
in which the body lives and interacts with objects.
A terminological remark is in place here. Some authors postulate a conceptual
differentiation between the body image and the body schema. Shaun Gallagher and
Jonathan Cole, in a paper which originally appeared in The Journal of Mind and Behavior in 1995, propose the conscious or unconscious operation as the criterion for distinction. For them, the body image “consists of a complex set of intentional states – perceptions, mental representations, beliefs and attitudes – in which the intentional object of
such states is one’s own body. Thus the body image involves a reflective intentionality.”
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(Gallagher and Cole 1998: 132) Body schema, on the other hand, even though it “can
have specific effects of cognitive experience […], it does not have the status of a conscious representation or belief.” Body schema “involves a system of moto capacities,
abilities, and habits that enable movement and the maintenance of posture.” (Gallagher
and Cole 1998: 132) As such, body schema “can be functionally integrated with the
environment, even to the extent that it frequently incorporates certain objects into its
operations – the hammer in the carpenter’s hand, the feather in the woman’s hat, and so
forth.” (Gallagher and Cole 1998: 132) However, as the writers also observe, “More
permanent attachments to the body – such as prosthetic devices – can become incorporated into both the image and the schema of the body affecting our bearing and approach to the world in both conscious projection and movement. Similarly some prostheses and even clothes greatly affect the way in which we view ourselves and our personal image.” (Gallagher and Cole 1998: 133)
While Gallagher and Cole may have their more specific disciplinary reasons for
making the distinction between body image and body schema, I follow the more dominant tradition (dating back to Schilder’s earlier work) of using both terms interchangeably, without distinguishing between conscious and unconscious components of the experience, and referring generally to what Grosz calls “a ‘fictional’ or fantasmatic construction of the body outside or beyond its neurological structure” (Grosz 1994: 89). In
this sense, the body image or schema, construed as spaciotemporal projection the subject’s body occupies the ambivalent position between the body itself and its “outside”;
being neither the body itself nor its other, it belongs to the body as its Third. As body’s
5
Third, it mediates between the body and its externality, the outside world, while involving both as its components.
This mediation, it has to be emphasised, consists of a two-directional movement.
In one sense, body image is then an effect of the negotiation of the body with space, a
carving out from the outer space of a spacial (perpetually dynamic) fragment – a lived
space which is body’s own and incorporated into its image. Conversely, this process of
projection involves its reversed double: the formation of the body image consists also in
an incorporation of otherness, which then ceases to be otherness and becomes the
body’s third: “External objects, implements, and instruments with which the subject
continually interacts become, while they are being used, intimate, vital, even libidinally
cathected parts of body image.” (Grosz 1994: 80). The absorption of the other, then,
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may occur not only on the level of language (ideology, prejudices. etc.), but also at the
pre-rational level of the body; and, paradoxically, through its double projection into and
of the surronding space: “The body and its various sensations are projected onto the
world, and conversly the world and its vicissitudes are introjected into the body of the
subject-to-be.” (Grosz 1994: 74)
It is also important to observe that the body image is determined not only by the
subject’s individual psycho-somatic constitution, but also by the socio-historical and
cultural context. This is clearly manifest in the phenomenon of the so-called personal
space: an intrusion into the space around the body is considered an infringement upon
the self’s (and the body’s) privacy – obviously an individual response – but the various
types of distance delimiting this personal space in different cultures result from sociocultural determination. Consequently, there is a similar individial/cultural parallel in the
dynamics of the body image. On the one hand, it is subject to change on the diachronical axis of the subject’s individual development: the body image changes, as Schilder
claims following Freud, from early childhood throughout the subject’s life, and may
undergo major transformations in the case of psychic ilness. At the same time, alterations in the socio-cultural context – through its conceptual apparatus, hierarchies of values, conventions etc. – will effect changes in individual body images.
What follows from the above remarks, then, is that body image, as Third, is subversive of boundaries and dichotomies in two senses: on the one hand – by constituting
a realm of the subject’s bodily reach extending beyond the physical flesh but experienced as a condition and part of the body’s functioning – it undermines the clear-cut
6
spatial boundaries between the corporeal inside and the outside world. On the other
hand, it also undermines the body-mind duality: the lived experience of the world occurs in an inseparable interaction of body and mind projected into space.
Ab-ject
While the generally positive connotation of the pro-ject, as an effect of projection, is contained in the ambiguous morpheme pro- (forward, but also for), the ab-ject –
even though it also pertains to body boundaries and margins – is the pro-ject’s opposite.
In two major and most influential discussions – by Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva – it
is identified with danger and horror, and relegated, albeit for different reasons, to the
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sphere of dirt, taboo, and impurity. Both Douglas and Kristeva approach the abject in
negative terms: Douglas in terms of danger of the margin to social homogeneity,
Kristeva in terms of expulsion, but related to na individual (and primarily female) subject.
Mary Douglas, in her anthropological analysis of the concept of pollution and
taboo in Purity and Danger – the book, whose inspiration for Kristeva is more than obvious – aims at demonstrating how the danger inflicted to bodily boundaries (or to the
symbolism of those boundaries) symbollically coincides with danger inflicted to community boundaries. (Douglas actually does not use the terms abject, abjection, but refuse, excrement, matter issuing from … etc.) While analysing rites related to pollution,
she opposes views reducing such rites to individual preoccupation with (the danger of)
pollution of the body. Working on the assumption that “the symbolism of body’s
boundaries is used […] to express danger to community boundaries,” she claims that
purity of the body reflects and symbolizes the integrity of a community: “When rituals
express anxiety about the body’s orifices, the sociological counterpart of of this anxiety
is a care to protect the political and cultural unity of a minority. […] The threatened
boundaries of their [Israelites, in this case] body politic would be well mirrored in their
care for the integrity, unity and purity of the physical body. […] The anxiety about bodily margins expresses danger to group survival. […] The rituals work upon the body
politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body.” (Douglas 2002: 152-154,
159) Yet, even if on the broader and more general anthropological level one has to appreciate Douglas’s contention that “the analysis of ritual symbolism cannot begin until
7
we recognize ritual as an attempt to create and maintain a particular culture,” at the basis of of this ritual lies the ambivalent status of that which subverts the clarity and purity
of bodily margin.
Kristeva approaches the abject from the feminist psychoanalytical perspective
(and reproaches Douglas for what truly is a merit of the latter’s book: namely that “a
hasty assimilation of […] data leads Mary Douglas naively to reject Freudian premises,”
(Kristeva 1982: 66), a rather conceited comment given Kristeva’s indebtness to Douglas’s analyses). Throughout Powers of Horror, abjection emerges as a broad concept
relating to what threatens the subject’s identity, being neither completely the other nor
fully a part of the subject’s sameness. Primarily, however, abjection relates to the preoedipal moment of the separation of the infant from the mother (or, more exactly, the
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mother’s body) and the consequent entrance into the (Lacanian) Symbolic Order and the
submission under the Law of the Father. In the context of the prelinguistic mapping of
the body (maternal, according to Kristeva) as opposed to the symbolic (paternal) and,
consequently, linguistic order abjection may be seen as a semantic concept, an interesting instance of the meaning’s third. Here, however, I want to concentrate on the corporeal aspect of abjection – the abject in its physical form. I will abstract here from
Kristeva’s ideological purposes and the purposes of the feminist discourse her work has
generated, whose objective is to undermine the patriarchal hierarchy of clear-cut bodily
cleanliness (male) as opposed to “dirt” and “horrifying” abjection (female). What interests me rather is the opposition against the Cartesian-driven ontology of solidity and
separateness.
This solidity may be exemplified by the concept of body construed as container,
as delineated, for example by Mark Johnson: “Our encounter with containment and
boundedness is one of the most pervasive features of our bodily experience.” (Johnson
1987: 21) On Johnson’s account, reflecting the (apparently) generally shared experience, we apprehend our bodies as “three-dimensional containers” into which various
things, like food and fluids, are put, and from which other things come out. Yet the proclaimed obviousness of the shared experience of self-containment is obviously undermined by the ambiguous nature of the substances issuing from the body – the abject.
The disturbance between the clear-cut opposition between the body and its other
by the third, the abject, occurs on two planes. In what might be called the soft version or
plane, even though involving physical abject matter, it refers to the self-constitution of
8
the subject. Judith Butler rightly observes that „the subject is constituted through the
force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constituted outside of the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.” (Butler 1999: 237). In other words, if the subject’s identity – including corporeal identity – is constituted in opposition to the refused abject, then the “trace” of
the abject itself is incorporated into subjectivity: the psychological and cognitive ambiguity reconfirms thus physical ambiguity. The operation of the Third as abject coalesces
here partly with the Third of the body image; the organic objects, the separated bits of
the body and its by-products or waste products also constitute a part of the body image:
“The voice, the breath, the odour, faeces, menstrual blood, urine, semen, are still parts
of the body image even when separated in space from the body.” (Schilder 1978: 213)
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On the other plane – in its hard material version – what further undermines the
I/Other, inside/ outside opposition is the ambiguous ontological status of the abject with
respect to body’s identity: “The abject is what of the body falls away from it while remaining irreducible to the subject/object and inside/outside oppositions. The abject necessarily partakes of both polarized terms but cannot be clearly identified with either.”
(Grosz 1994: 192) And, as Grosz observes earlier, these rejected organic components
“retain something of the cathexis and value of a body part even when they are separated
from the body.” (Grosz 1994: 81). Important here is the temporal determination of
spacial inclusion/exclusion: the moment of radical separation from the body of what has
been a part of its apparent totality – the moment extended to a continuum throught the
permanent activity of the flesh refusing itself. In the ontological sense, the abject vaccilates between the body and non-body; what is now me (my nails, my hair, my mucus)
in a moment may become not-me (the abject): “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either.” (Kristeva 1982: 2) The Third.
Furthermore, most of the abject substances (apart from hair, nails, scab and
crust) are fluid, which further destabilizes the solidity of the body. These body fluids, as
Elizabeth Grosz observes, “attest to the permaebility of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside, its liability to collapse into the outside (this is what death implies),
to the perilous division of the body’s inside and its outside.” (Grosz 1994: 193) From
the point of view of disgust and fear, one might devise a hierarchy of those abject stimuli, with tears, sweat and saliva on one extreme and excrement and urine on the other.
Yet these hierarchies can easily be overthrown: the romantic lover kissing tears of her
9
face and the masochist lover eating excrement or drinking urine in de Sade’s world both
aim at intimacy. Purity of the substance is not the point: Kristeva is right when she
writes that “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect order, position, rules. The inbewteen, the ambiguous, the composite.” (Kristeva 1982: 4).
While ontologically limited to the material and occupying the lowest stratum in
the cultural hierarchy, the abject Third reaches also into the metaphysical and eschatological. The vulnerability of bodily boundaries2, the easiness with which the refuse undergoes the temporal conversion from alive to dead, while still retaining a material link
with the its origin, the subject’s flesh, constitute a permanent reminder of the subject’s
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chatological apsect of the abject: “These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what
life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border
of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that
border. Such waste drops so that I might live, untill from loss to loss, nothing remains in
me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver. (Kristeva 1982: 3).
Even though from the organic point of view this might be seen as simplification because
there is a continual reproduction of the refuse, eschatologically the abject Third remains
a material embodiment of finality and thus a cause of anxiety, Angst, in the face of the
ultimate.
In/ter-ject
In/terjection as a mode of emergence of the Third of the body is more heterogeneous than the previous fields of its operation and, as the the title of this section
suggests, involves both the surface of the body and its indepth constitution. In this
section, I will focus on the amalgamation of the organic and the inorganic (or alien),
especially the technological, consisting either in an invasive integration of the other
with the body’s structure (metaphorically: in-jection), or their surface merger (interjection). Both types, although in a different measure, raise ontological questions of
liminality and hybridity. I will illustrate the first type with the increasinly notorious
2
See Mary Douglas: “Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. […] Matter issuing from them
[orifices of the body] is the marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or
tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundaries of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin,
nail, hair clippings and sweat.” (Douglas 2002: 150)
10
and hybridity. I will illustrate the first type with the increasinly notorious issue of the
implant, and the latter with parergon and interface.
Third as Parergon
Beyond the soma, in cultural terms, the body may be seen and is now seen as
text. The textuality of the body makes it legitimate to view its surface limit as a parergon, the concept made available to contemporary theory by Jacques Derrida in The
Truth in Painting, where he uses it with reference to the textuality of works of art. With
respect to the body, the “parergonization” of its surface is an effect of intrusion, either
the subject’s own or imposed by the socio-cultural context, or both. Ranjana Knanna,
while commenting on Derrida’s comment on the concept of beauty in Kant (“neither the
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finality nor the end, neither the lacking goal nor the lack of a goal, but the edging in
sans of the pure cut,” Derrida 1987: 89) places empasis on radical intervention: “The
aesthetics of the parergon is especially concerned with this cut or interruption…”
(Khanna 2003: 18) This applies equally well to the text/ure of the body, in which case,
the “cut” consists in an incorporation into its surface of the other, which now, with the
moment of incorporation, ceases being the other but, not fully being the body itself, it
becomes the body’s Third. The visibility of the parergon is the effect of this Third.
While parergon is frequently perceived in terms of threat or danger to the border
(it carries “implications of threatened borders, their antinomies, and the opening up of
oneself to potential risk and damage by the supplement or trace threatening the border”
or “damage caused by the supplement” (Khanna 2003: 16, 17)), it is not so necessarily
in the case of the body. Despite the metaphorical “cut,” the mechanism of intervention
need not be violent, and even if it is, it may at the same time involve a welcome incorporation of the Third into the body’s surface for the sake of expounding its texturality.
Many of the practices of parergonization of the body have been known since remote times (and in cultures remote to the West), but it is only in the context of postmodernity that these interventions have become discursively identifiable as forms of negotiation of the body and its other, and as undermining the limits of both flesh and self.
The practices of the production of the parergon Third are multifarious: from mild alterations of the body’s shape and appearance, like clothing and various types of attire,
through hair style and make-up, to invasive ones, like tattooing, piercing, scarification
and incorporation into the body of (now no longer) alien object. What they all have in
11
common is the alteration of the biological flesh by what does not somatically belong to
it, but which, once incorporated into/onto the parergon, can no longer be said to remain
in the sphere of the other, event though it is not yet the body itself.
The parergon Third of the body may be seen as an effect of two operations. On
the one hand, it is seen, especially by feminist critics, as a an effect of social and
cultural inscription, either tacitly accepted or even welcome, or nonviolently imposed
by the normative practices of power. Foregrounding this stance, Elizabeth Grosz writes:
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Makeup, stilletos, bras, hair sprays, clothing, underclothing mark women’s bodies,
whether black or white, in ways in which hair styles, professional training, personal
grooming, gait, posture, body building, and sports mark men’s. There is nothing
natural or ahistorical about these modes of corporeal inscription. Through them,
bodies are made amenable to the prevailing exigencies of power. They make the
flesh into a particular type of body. (Grosz 1994: 142)
On this view, the parergon Third subverts not only bodily boundaries, but also
those between biology and culture. The consequence of this stance is that there are no
“pure,” natural bodies without the parergon Third; just like the abject Third so the Third
of the parergon is an inevitable and inescapable product of the operation of culture:
“There is no ‘natural’ norm; there are only cultural forms of body, which do or do not
conform to social norms.”3 (Grosz 1994: 143).
The question of conformity (or the lack of it) to social norms is also in the center
of attention of the other stance which, rather than emphasizing cultural and social
“disciplining” of the body, focuses on the individual’s (or group’s) conscious or semiconscious effort at the formation of the self through alterations of the body’s texture.
What is at stake here is on the one hand an attainment or formulation of individual identity, and, on the other hand, a reinforcement of that identity through resistance to social
norms in general and to the dominant models of the body in particular. As Marzena
Kubisz claims in Strategies of Resistance, “corporeal modifications, both canonical and
oppositional, have become for the post-modern subject a strategy of identification.”
(Kubisz 2003: 11) For Kubisz, the “canonical” modifications, such as body adornment
or cosmetic surgery, are not so much symptoms of patriarchal oppresion, but rather in3
An illustrative example, vividly relating South American and Western cultures, is given by Katherine
Frank: “Terence Turner discusses the Kayapo of the Amazon, who exhibit an elaborate code of bodily
adornment despite the fact that they do not wear clothing (lip plugs, penis sheaths, beads, body painting,
plucked eyebrows, head shaving, etc.) and writes: ‘the apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a
fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman.,” (Frank 2005:
107; quoting Turner 1980:115)
12
dividual modes of identity search or re-confirmation. In this sense, she follows Kathy
Davis, who claims that “Cosmetic surgery is an intervention in identity […]. [B]y providing a woman with a different starting point, cosmetic surgery can open up the possibility to renegotiate her relationship to her body and construct a different sense of self.”
(Davis 1995: 113; quoted in Kubisz 2003: 25)
The parergon Third, as the product of such practices, while still remaining between the body and its other, paradoxically becomes an integrating factor for the body
it/self. On a larger scale, such practices, if adopted by a community, may become strategies for group identification, as in the case of the so-called Modern Primitives (Kubisz
2003: 41-49), a community led by Fakir Mustafar, who by means of a variety of body
modification techniques aimed at “a sense of stability on the individual and collective
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level.” (Kubisz 2003: 44) The Third thus becomes a shared experience of the individuals making up the group, the parergonization of the body being a technology of the
construction of identity in both individual and communal dimension. However, as
Kubisz observes, body modifications – or, we may add, the parergonization of the body
in general – may become also a form of resistance against the dominant models of the
body, norms of consumption, and their de-individualizing effects: “there is a deep sense
of the possibility of exerting control over external and internal reality through the
body,” this control emerging on the social level as a form of resistance. (Kubisz 2003:
48)
Paradoxically then, while the Third of the parergon denies the body a fixity and
a stability of its boundaries, it it at the same time may become an integrative factor on
both on both individual and communal level; on the other hand, if effected from the
external position of power, it may be a form of disciplining the self into canonical
modes of behaviour.
Implant
In a limited way the collapse between the organic and inorganic, epitomized by
the implant, has already been anticipated through the parergonization of the body. Fortunately, perhaps, we have not yet reached the stage already hailed, as Scott Bukatman
demonstrates, in the discourse of cyberpunk, science fiction and the related cultural discourse, of “the postmodern crisis of a body that remains central to the operations of advanced capitalism as a sign, while it has become entirely superfluous as an object” (Bu-
13
katman 1993: 16), that is, a body whose “reality is that of refuse expelled as surplusmatter no longer necessary for the autonomous functioning of the technoscope” (Kroker
and Kroker : 21, quoted in Bukatman 1993: 16). Still, the intrusion of inorganic and
technological matter into the body has qualitatively changed the body’s ontology and
has imploded the boundaries of the body from the inside. If, due to the intermingling of
the body with technology and the ensuing cyborgization of the body, there is „a crisis
around untenable definitions of the human,” as Bukatman claims (Bukatman 1993: 5), it
certainly cannot be solved within the framework of the binary opposition body/Other
and the related dichotmies. The ontology of the trans/human of necessity involves the
Third.
An implant is the most obvious form of penetration of the alien matter into the
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human body leading to a fusion of the technological and the organic, the Third. By “implant,” as an umbrella term, I mean here all sorts of prostheses, technological devices
like pacemakers, “proper” implants, artificial replacements, transplanted organs, and the
like. Known since ancient times, they become more and more part of the human cyborg.
We read about endoprostheses, that is prostheses implanted into child’s part of the body,
which “grow” with it, as the body grows. (Pochrzęst 2006). Even though the growth is
mechanical (i.e., stimulated by a mini-engine within the prosthesis) and not organic, and
even though such endoprostheses are still rare, a further step towards the cyborgization
of the body has been made. This step has been surpassed by the neuroprostheses and
electronic implants, a recent example (from June 2004) being the so-called “Brain
Gate,” enabling the patient not only to operate mechanical devices by moving – purely
by means of brain effort otherwise called thinking – the cursor on the screen of a computer attached to home appliances, but also to move a neuroprotheisis (an artificial arm).
Biomimetics and bionics continue work on synthetic muscles and prostheses operated
by the brain via nervous impulses. Bionanotechnology’s explorations concentrate on
neuroimplants, which will make possible not only the reception of stimuli from the
brain, but also their transmission in the opposite direction. And even though we may
have to wait for applicable results of such research for another couple of decades, the
progress of cyborgization and hybridization of the body – already an undeniable fact –is
inevitable.
In the process of the incorporation of material otherness, the latter undergoes
both an ontological and an epistemological alteration – not (or at least not yet) an or-
14
ganic part of the body but at the same time merged with it and assimilated, it becomes
its Third, inseperable from the totality of bodily functions and from body image. The
almost (but not quite) futuristic examples given above, and the prognoses of the new
sciences leave no doubt that the Third of the body will grow, all the more so that the
future of technology seems to foreshadow an enormous possibility of its expansion.
Interface
The modality of the interface as Third differs qualitatively from that of parergon
and body image. While parergon relies on an organic-inorganic, and the body image on
a somatic-percepteptual transgression of the body’s organic boundaries, the interface, in
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addition, transgresses its character as the Third of the body and, unlike those discussed
so far, becomes also the Third of the mind; it attaches the subject to new spaces: virtual,
social, informational, etc. Of course, to some extent all instances of the Third link the
body with cultural space via their siginificative and semiotic function; the interface as
Third, however, becomes body’s extension into imaginary or real (social, informational)
spaces.
The interface now becomes a metaphorical parergon fusing the organic with the
technological, to which Scott Bukatman refers as to an „interface between human subject and terminal space” (Bukatman 1993: 18). The effectiveness of such an interface
relies on the opening of bodily boundaries to the technological other, which gives rise to
“pervasive notions that such boundaries, if they exists at all, are almost infinitely malleable. The blurred interface between human and electronic technology is perhaps the
trope that most effectively defines the concerns of postmodern culture.” (Bukatman
1993: 192) The result of such an interface on the human side is the creation of a qualitatively new type of subject which Bukatmann calls “terminal identity.” He construes
terminal identity in both senses implied by the adjective: “Terminal identity: an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer atation or television screen.” (Bukatman 1993: 9).
Even though terminal identity is a metaphorical concept, “a form of speech” (Bukatman
1993: 22), it also is “ a potentially subversive reconception of the subject that situates
the human and the technological as coextensive, codependent, and mutually defining.”
15
(Bukatman 1993: 22) What emerges from such a hybrid co-dependence is a transgression beyond the dichotomy of the body and its other into the realm of the Third.
The most evident instance of interface as Third, is the so-called virtual reality.
Bukatman aptly summarises its impact on both our conceptual apparatus and the body
itself: “Such ontological and epistemological issues as the nature of the human, the real,
experience, sensation, cognition, identity, and gender are all placed, if not under erasure,
then certainly in question around the discursive object of virtual reality and the postulated existence of perfect, simulated environments. Virtual reality has become the very
embodiment of postmodern disembodiment.” (Bukatman 1993: 188) Combined with
sensors communicating with the computer, the helmet responding to movements, gloves
cooperating with hands in transmitting the electric stimuli, the body parts involved in
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the technological part of the process become an interface between the physical space
and the virtual space in which the phenomenal body of the participant, as Bukatman
calls it following Merleau-Ponty, immerses into the virtual space. It is the inseparability
of the corporeal and the technological – the body’s Third – that constitutes the interface
enabling the immersion into virtuality.
In a less efective but similar way the body links with the technological in the
mind’s drive to connect to the cyberspace of the world wide web. The visible and the
tactile – computer screen and keyboard – become body’s extensions facilitating acces to
spaces otherwise beyond the subject’s reach. This however, is not yet the point; in this
sense computer could still be considered as an easily dispensable tool. With the moment, however, when the cyberspace becomes an extension of the mental space, when
one begins to “think” cyberspace, the tool changes into an inteface; and it is not the
quantitative intesity, but qualitative change that is the cause of transformation (although
certainly there is a relation between the two) For the post-idustrial, technological
individual (or more generally, for the postmodern subject) life without cyberspace
would be an amputated life – an imprisonment in the space of the real. The tactile-visual
merger with the keyboard and the screen, albeit temporary, produces the body’s Third
which becomes a portal linking that real with the cyber-imaginary.
This is true especially true in the case of games, which epitomize the interfacing
of the bodily and the digital and “represent the most complete symbiosis generally
available between human and computer – a fusion of spaces, goals, options, and perspectives.” (Bukatman 1993: 196-197).
It is so because, as Bukatman continues,
16
“through a play a kinetic interaction is establishes between subject and object: the perceiving body becomes a phenomenal body.” (Bukatman 1993: 199) This kind of imaginary corporeal extension occurs especially in the case of the first person mode, when by
means of body-machine interface, “the character is inserted into the cybernetic field,
transforming perception into subject mobility.”(Bukatman 1993: 201) Like in the case
of virtual reality, the interfacial Third of the body grants the subject new spacial modes
and, in addition, new modes of imaginary subjectivity.
A similar case of the transmutation of the tool into the Third of the body is the
cellular phone. As we learn from sociological insights, the social space provided by
cellular phone has to a large extent become a substitute of the social space provided by
common playground (Staszewski 2007) or a café. While the stationary phone tends to
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be seen and used as a separate and independent technological device, the portability of
the cellular phone changes its ontology in relation to the human body. With numerous
subjects, especially from younger generations, cellular phone undergoes a transformation from an interface to a semi-implant – a prosthesis personalized according to individual needs (screen, ring, music etc.). To some of youngsters, as evidenced by a questionnaire, “mobile is more important than underwear” (Staszewski 2007: 37); others
consider the phone as part of their (corporeal) self: “when I don’t have my mobile with
me, I feel as if a part of me were missing” (Staszewski 2007: 37). Again, while not biologically inherent in the body, the mobile – with the growing population of individuals
– cannot be separated from it; as body’s Third, it opens up interactive spaces inevitable
for the subject’s existence.
While all these “appliances” differ with respect to their operation and application, they all at the same time constitute extensions of the body facilitating access to a
variety of spacial realms: from the phenomal space of virtual reality to the social space
of the mobile network community. In the sense in which interface is the Third of the
body, it has become, to quote Bukatman again, “a significantly ambiguous boundary
between human and technology. The interface relocates the human, in fact redefines the
human as part of the cybernetic system of information circulation and managament.”
(Bukatman 1993: 192). The proclamation, made by Bruce Mazlish in 1972, that the discontinuity between man and machine is now gone, can hardly be questioned; what provides the continuity is the realm of the body’s Third.
17
Conclusion
The Third of the body, thus, is not the other in its haecceity as otherness; it is the
other invested with the same, inevitably carrying the trace of the same. As such, the
Third of the body emerges as a heterogeneous phenomenon (rather than a category),
involving perceptual processes, self-apprehension, self-cognition, and corporeal relations with the (more or less) material other. Despite this heterogeneity, all manifestations of the body’s Third share one tendency – the movement towards the collapse of
the clear-cut boundary between the body and the other and a formation in its place of a
new realm. This collapse and formation are visible – and can be explained – from the
perspective of the lived body and its lived experience. From the position of traditional
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ontology4, however, they can hardly be accounted for: its apparatus is not adequate to
embrace the tertium. A solution might be an ontology based not on concepts of totality
and wholeness, but an ontology assuming heterogeneity as its founding principle: for
example the Deleuzian theory of the permanent flow of intensities. This, however, requires a separate discussion.
4
Well epitomized in the words of its great predecessor and master: “what has nothing outside it is complete and whole. For thus we define whole – that from which nothing is wanting, as a whole man or a
whole box. What is true of each particular is true of the whole as such – the whole is that of which nothing is outside.” (Aristotle 1970: 207a).
18
REFERENCES
Bukatman, Scott, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993.
Butler, Judith, “Bodies that Matter,” in: Price, Janet and Margrit Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theoryand the Body. A Reader, New York: Routledge, 1999, 235-245.
Davis, Kathy, Reshaping the Female Body, New York and London: Routledge, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger. An analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo.
London and New York: Routledge 2002 (1966).
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Frank, Katherine, “Body Talk. Revelations of Self and Body in Contemporary StripClubs,” in: Adeline Masquellier, ed., Dirt, Undress, and Difference. Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface, Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press
2005, 996-121.
Gallagher, Shaun and Jonathan Cole, “Body Image and Body Schema in a Deafferented
Subject,” in: Donn Welton, ed., Body and Flesh. A philosophical Reader, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998.
Gatens, Moira, “Power, Bodies and Difference,” in: Price, Janet and Margrit Shildrick,
eds., Feminist Theoryand the Body. A Reader, New York: Routledge, 1999, 227-234.
Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism, St. Leonards: Allen
& Unwin, 1994.
Grosz, Elizabeth, “Psychoanalysis and the Body,” in: Price, Janet and Margrit Shildrick,
eds., Feminist Theoryand the Body. A Reader, New York: Routledge, 1999, 267-271.
Head, Henry and G. Holmes, “Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions,” Brain 34,
1911, 102-254.
Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.
Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, “Theses on the Disappearing Body in the HyperModern Condition,” in: Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds., Body Invaders.
Panic Sex in America, New York: St. Martins Press, 1987, 20-34.
Khanna, Ranjana, “ Frames, Contexts, Community, Justice,” diacritics, Vol. 33, No. 2,
2003, 11-41.
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror. Amn Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
19
Kubisz, Marzena, Strategies of Resistance. Body, Identity and Representation in Western
Culture, Frankfurt, Berlin, New York: Peter Lang, 2003.
Mazlish, Bruce, „The Fourth Discontinuity,” in: Kranzber, Melvin and Davenport, eds.,
Technology and Culture, New York: New American Library, 1972, 216-232.
Pochrzęst, Agnieszka, “Proteza rośnie z wiekiem”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 29.03. 2006
Schilder, Paul, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche, New York: International Universities Press, 1978.
Staszewski, Wojciech, “Dzieci z billingu, Wysokie Obcasy, 17.02.2007, 31-37.
Turner, Terence, “The Social Skin,” in: Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, eds., Not
Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, Beferly Hills,
California: Sage, 112-140.
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With a Carving Knife: Unearthing the Feminine
A Prelude to Digging Oneself Out of a Grave
How to disrupt. Said that the root must be found before it can be
analyzed, so go to the root. Note how closely it twists with other
roots, how shoots and nodular networks tentacle and tangle with it, a
deep meshy blanket of flesh and woody tendrils, a scrapheap of nerves,
ideas, sloughed cells, letters, numbers. Note how you can't quite pull
a shoot without some clumped matter coming with it; how you can't yank
a single hair without a whole head coming up somewhere, attached to it.
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Help this head. Sever its connection to the mass, hold it up and let it
examine the root it came from - its eyes will be flitted with mud and
will need rinsing. The clots of soil and blood must be unplugged from
its mouth and throat. Let it look around, assess, embody itself,
realize it is not only a head but already a body, and that she doesn't
have to stay in the ground, bound to squirming, writhing earth and all
the mythical and cosmological rotting baggage held there in the vines
and nodework like a still yet to be realized object of Dreamtime.
Earth is not soft and pretty but there lies Woman, believing
herself to be comfortable in her natural surroundings, fingering
fistfuls of
dirt and cosmic interconnectedness and accepting her role
as part of the ground that is walked on. The metaphor connecting the
feminine and the Earth, wet and easy, is always available and
frequently drawn on. Consider how it rots. How it is oversimplified and
deeply-rooted in a primordial muck that we cling to because it's of the
same stuff we stand on. Earth. Ground. If it's in the ground, it must
be solid. Must be unmovable, must be a permanent bundling of sticks and
nerves that define the great Mother we wish to form in/of it. Gaia's
generous hips and belly still preside, even in a world that feels
doomed by the phallic: when the Man gets you down, pride in femininity
can be reassured by leaning back on a doughy goddess and re-connecting
with the beauty of biological function. There be treasure. The easiest
way to be respected as female is still to maintain the supposedly
inherent gentleness of femininity, an automatically intimate
relationship with the lush and peace of Nature, the delicacy of the
fruits and flowers that line the life and womb of every Irigaraian twolips goddess. No real lady would fight; no strong, confident woman need
indulge in boy games like war. The feminine pretends power in its
passive mode of difference to the phallic; it eschews what it assumes
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to be male attributes, such as power, competition, violence, and, for
those women who run into trouble with the law, the female position
guarantees their softness, their innocence, and thereby their lack of
responsibility for any action deemed to be unfeminine.
How to disrupt, for something's not right with the use of land as
stand-in for a woman, though both have been property, are useable, and
the body of one fits into the other. She doesn't belong there. She is a
concept that decomposes in a specifically passive way, yet everywhere,
she already cuts and screams and brings death tête-à-tête with the
other pronouns. She abuses, batters, murders, speak and writes acid.
That doesn't sit quiet with pretty Earth: simply clashes. She is not
Earth, can't be grounded, seeded, farmed, happy nurture pit. Dig up,
cu(n)t out.
The digging is hard, of course, because so many of us are lonely,
want the docile arm-flesh to be reality, can't understand that arm's
relationship to a fist. Boys may be boys, but the humiliation of being
struck by a woman smacks of darkness no one cares to see. How to
disrupt. How to get in that darkness, see a face there - see that it is
in every face - when we refuse to admit femininity is no guarantee of
sugar and spice, no fruity orchard full of rosy cheeks and bountiful
hips. Consider gender a booby-trap, a false set of boundaries erected
to discourage wandering, exploration, improvement, growth. Consider
fear of the dark a phobia that discourages wandering, exploration,
improvement, growth. Face dark, grit teeth, look. Navigation begins
therein, an attempt to address what may have been more pleasant and
safe to not see, and speak of it. Speak to it. Find words, because to
express is to have agency; to verbalize is to make visible.
Here I come in and start to play with what terrifies and
terrorizes me, see how what I don't understand hurts me. How to disrupt
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is somewhere in the language, in the tactical games of poetics. If I
dig and yank the feminine from it's root, it's grounded position, I
stand with torn clusters of language that is at times vulnerable,
generally vicious, and potentially irresponsible. Vulnerable because I
have literally refused to have ground to stand on; vicious and
potentially irresponsible because that is the nature of violent
behavior, the effect of an energy unleashed without full knowledge of
what it will do, never mind where it came from. The poetic experiment
carries the hope of channeling that energy by finding a way to express
it: the giving of a name, the granting of a face or bodily referent, or
at the least, simply an entry into a space where language begins to
come to terms with what it can't express - specifically, the
relationship between the feminine and violence where the feminine is
not soft and Earth-bound. The poems thus far are marked by
deceptiveness, accusation, jaggedly (under)narrated unfortunate events
with uncertain victims, and fluid movement between positions of
defensive and offensive behaviors. The language in any case is always
fraught with and indulgent of physical violence translated into verbal
assault as well as a heavy dosage of nauseating cliché. The language
taunts and flexes in devious ways, but as of yet has no certain
strategy except to inflame and arouse, to aggressively suggest or even
dare engagement with its content. Its form is violent to the extent
that it means harm via trickery and misinformation, a technique that is
arguably another stereotype of the feminine, but is perhaps more
reasonably understood as a key means by which the less-visibly
empowered subject undercuts and loots those above them.
As the project is in an early stage of what will be a lengthy
development process, I present here a small sample of the poems I will
perform live at the conference.
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91
*
you call it evil
i must touch it
tongue
intension
forking
the serrated underbelly
o burped flesh bits called lip
split by quick hiss pop
silence
b/n one alveolar
blossom n the next
a series of wintered blooms
scratchy n lung gobbed
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the thing you didn't
make gurgles n auto
sucks
an intricate fluff
only smelling
b/c you proclaimed the name
odiferous pit where scum
dump shit n blame
ground for spewing
filth
its dirt
poisoned
hot waste glown in laps n gumlines
gooped in the tarry origins
of your facehole spread in
stiff tendon panic
skull
gaping lonely for all this lack
you invent
*
now is a time to storm. Shall I speak for thee
though rhetoric dismembers the very
reality it would portray.
gets worse.
tongue twigged
n flickered to dirt to twitch
to batter itself in s'miecie & bloto
so you must
mouth
sorry
is bleeding
my hole
i've lost
i've nothing
to say
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and meanwhile with no place in scummy
bandages to tuck a pen
no words
for golem just empty
crumples when he wakes:
there's nothing
to do
but wave your stumps
as if to perfume the room
untouchable & unable
to touch
sure,
Speak like hands
when you're all bound & bleeding
squirrel-flopped
useless shuddering
cuts
in This tedious sampler means
A body
stopp'd neither
use
nor ornament
blocked nothing
but blows
tho even blows come
through
*
material girl
it
lie there
what fists
mean when
the web tears
and you can't blame a rich man
his thick wad
don't gag
you
have nothing but cancer
in your pocket
and if not a victim will you make one
admit
that's what
you're here for
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*
try me
i squeal
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when your spine pops
and out lolls tongue
tinned meat of the mouth
so hungry for pink you lick
the papers
eat celebrity in print
for current moves about
punched up tits
your face now spreads
the front page
darkens
from your head leaks
the sashy sound of stuff through punctured
vessels deflate that skull at last
a freshly exposed
mind
over
un mattered body
lifeless twat
shots
soak your dribbled
content
95
*
easy living room scene
come in
her split duct gloops pus
all masking, all crocodile
dreaming the next oops-i-slipped
by the water's edge
peering up from under
that streak of grime
aspiring
to the dopey
support of any wish
full meatling that offers a tilted head
or houndish gait
despite the gaudy
backsplash n titillating
odour of tendon
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she's spread warm steam still haunts a miss calculation
a bit of broken grammar
in some body's sunken pelvis
the mash in his pants
his runny bunch of perforations
souped about
her
floor
A hand wants taking & soothing
now
strokes
& sympathy for her lack
of organs
lie
empty as the shells she's scraped
clean
lines of defense
under cover
that pretty smile n
freshly battered
look
mean
From the “Great Darkness” to the “Quiet Revolution”: Michel Tremblay’s
Reinterpretation of the Frontier between the Francophone East and the Anglophone
West of Montreal in Some Night My Prince Will Come
By Marie-Claude Legault
“Throughout my childhood I hadn’t even known that Anglos existed, that Montreal was
divided in two, with the east end belonging to us Francophones and the west to the
Anglos, that there was a conflict between the two solitudes, as we used to say, a conflict
dating back to the Conquest in 1760 and that it was doubtful we’d ever see a way out of
it” (26).
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“For a long time I’d thought it strange that there were two Santas, one, Francophone at
Dupuis Frères, the other, Anglophone, at Eaton’s. Every December my mother took me
to meet both of them and I asked each one for the same presents, in French, suspecting
that the second didn’t understand me” (27).
97
Introduction
From 1944 to 1959, the province of Québec lived in an oppressive atmosphere called
“période de la grande noirceur.” In this period of cultural, social, and sexual darkness, the
Catholic Church controlled the government of Maurice Duplessis and the lives of
countless Canadiens Français (the term Québécois was not used yet). Families were
encouraged to procreate. Birth control was strictly forbidden. As a result, families of 10,
15, and even 20 children were common. Of course, most of those families were
extremely poor and destitute. The Catholic Church also controlled what people could
read and what people could watch. Books and movies that did not promote Catholic
values were put “à l`index,” an expression that means they were only available under the
table. Artists suffered under this clerical regime that denied freedom of expression. In
1959 Maurice Duplessis died. His death marked the beginning of a new era (1960-1966)
that would reject the control of the Catholic Church. After the great darkness, the quiet
revolution (Révolution tranquille) would encourage sexual and cultural freedom.
This paper discusses how Michel Tremblay’s autobiographical novel, Some Night My
Prince Will Come (1995), explores the transition period in Québec history between the
Grande Noirceur and the Révolution tranquille through a reinterpretation of the cultural
and geographical frontier between the Francophone East and the Anglophone West of
Montreal. Saint-Laurent or “La Main” is the street that divides Montreal between East
(traditionally seen as working-class and Francophone) and West (wealthy and
Anglophone). Leaving his Plateau Mont-Royal home (which is located on the eastern
1
side of Saint-Laurent) for one night, Tremblay’s first-person narrator, who is 18 in 1960,
becomes a Montreal version of Voltaire’s Candide whose innocence is about to be
shattered by the anticipation of debaucheries West of Saint-Laurent, the Anglo "capital"
of Montreal. The narrator’s entrance into the adult world coincides with the birth of the
most important period in Québec history. Using his narrator’s quest to lose his virginity
as a parallel to the anticipated burgeoning of Québec society, Tremblay exposes the
situation of the grande noirceur and projects its disappearance through the deconstruction
and reconfiguration of values and stereotypes on each side of the Saint-Laurent
“frontier.”
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The novel follows the move from an archaic and narrow-minded French-Canadian
society controlled by the Catholic Church to a Québec nation who opens itself to the
world by embracing modernity through a rejection of the Church. Initially, the narrator
seeks to find in the Anglophone West the alternative lifestyle (gay clubs, beatnik cafés)
and general art exposure that cannot exist where he comes from. This was the case
because the Francophone East embodied the grande noirceur “ideals” of censorship. The
Catholic Church put art and sex à l`index. Even though the narrator is torn between his
nationalist impulses that make him resent the fact there is a place in Montreal that would
not understand when he spoke French (“My nationalism was due among other things to
how hard it was—the minute I’d crossed the frontier of St. Lawrence Boulevard—to go
to movie theatres in the west end, to be served in French in my own city” (27)) and the
desire to explore this “forbidden” Montreal of culture and sex, his nationalism does not
prevent him from crossing the frontier. It is more important to have freedom of
expression in English than a censored one in French. However, the symbolic and
geographical crossing of Saint-Laurent Street from East to West does not confirm the
stereotypes expected by the narrator. Rather, it allows for a reconfiguration of the
stereotypes usually associated with Francophones and Anglophones by introducing the
narrator to a different reality that overlooks language issues and barriers.
Using as a critical approach Lacan’s theory of the subject and the "Other," I will
analyze how Tremblay’s narrator recognizes some parts of his Francophone self through
his meeting and identification with an Anglophone other. The narrator’s anticipated fear
of being linguistically alienated is replaced by the recognition of familiar points de
repères once on Anglophone soil. In fact, the beatnik café, El Cortijo, and the gay clubs,
Quatre Coins du Monde and The Tropical, are Francophone bastions in the West.
Tremblay’s narrator, however, feels like an outsider in those French settings. Ironically,
his only familiar point de repère on the West side of Saint-Laurent is found through the
Anglophone, Alan. Both share the same innocence through their status as "virgins."
Moreover, the stereotypes usually associated with Anglophones as being wealthy and
2
ignorant of French language and cultures are shattered when Alan turns out to be a poor
Anglo who can speak French. The rejection of the Catholic Church and the embrace of
the Révolution tranquille materialize at the end of the novel when the narrator brings his
Anglo conquest east of Saint-Laurent. The loss of his virginity on the east side of SaintLaurent rather than on the west side symbolically marks the beginning of a new era: the
birth of Québec as a nation through a cultural and sexual revolution.
Historical and Social Context of Tremblay’s autobiographical novel
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Michel Tremblay grew up in Montreal during the “grande noirceur” (he was born in
1942). His works often deal with the transition period between the “grande noirceur” and
the “révolution tranquille.” His characters are caught between obedience to the rules
dictated by the Catholic Church and the temptation to see beyond that restrictive world.
We only have to think of Tremblay’s famous play, Les Belles Soeurs, as a powerful
example of this representation. The sisters in law are shocked by whatever clashes with
their Catholic values but at the same time they resent those same values that force them to
be mothers and wives. They resent and envy the younger generation for being able to
transgress those values. In Some Night My Prince Will Come, Tremblay’s first-person
narrator symbolizes this younger generation who embraces the Révolution tranquille. He
needs, however, to let go of his “grande noirceur” upbringing. His “grande noirceur”
upbringing would encourage him to find the right girl, to get married, and to have
children. It would also encourage him to study the masculine trade of typography and
presswork (like his father and brother). Tremblay’s narrator feels guilty. He wants to find
the right guy. He also wants to become a writer (looked down upon as a more feminine
trade). Tremblay transposes the transition between the two historical periods and its
effects on his narrator to the geographical division of Montreal between east and west.
The Frontier between the Francophone East and the Anglophone West of Montreal
Saint-Laurent or "La Main" is one of the most famous and cosmopolitan streets of
Montreal. It divides the city between east and west. For a long time, people perceived this
frontier as separating two homogeneous worlds that sheltered linguistic, social, and
cultural stereotypes: The mostly Francophone, working-class and Catholic east end, and
the mostly Anglophone, wealthy, and Protestant west end. Although this is less the case
today as there are more and more Francophones living in the west end and vice versa, the
stereotypes still persist. Tremblay’s novel, which takes place in 1960, reproduces the
traditional perception of the frontier between the two worlds. His narrator, who lives with
his parents on the east side of Saint-Laurent, views this part of Montreal as “home.” This
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familiar turf is comfortable and reassuring. For instance, while on the west side, the
narrator cannot help thinking of “a cake [that] was waiting for [him] at home, or a rice
pudding.” He also sees himself “in front of the TV, cozy and warm, a big glass of milk in
[his] hand” (70). Needless to say that the west side of Saint-Laurent represents anything
but “comfort food” to the narrator. Rather, it comes across as mysteriously different.
Almost as if the narrator is discovering a new country: “For me, St. Catherine Street west
of Peel (which is west of Saint-Laurent) was an unfathomable mystery that I had not yet
tried to solve” (26). In fact, Tremblay’s narrator is extremely self-conscious of this
difference as he worries over his entrance into the gay clubs of the west end: “[I was]
positive that the moment I set foot inside the Tropical or the Quatre Coins du Monde,
both of them in the west end of town, which was still the preserve of Montreal
Anglophones, dozens of heads would turn in my direction and grimaces of disgust would
spread through the bar at the sight of the vulgar incarnation of the east end that I was”
(19). This “vulgar incarnation of the east end” pushes the narrator to be concerned about
his clothes and about the way he smells: “Did my clothes proclaim my plebeian roots?
Did I still smell of the leftover pea soup I’d eaten so greedily before I left the house?”
(28) We see from the narrator’s self-deprecating remarks that he is ashamed of some
aspects of his east end identity. The reference to “pea soup,” “plebeian roots,” and
“vulgar” evokes his French-Canadian working-class background. This inferiority
complex surfaces when he imagines himself amongst the wealthy Anglophones. What is
familiar and acceptable for the narrator when he is at home becomes strange and
shameful on the west side of Saint-Laurent.
The east end image that is problematic to the narrator when he is visiting the
western side of Saint-Laurent reflects a more general situation with French-Canadian
identity. Before 1960 the term “Canadiens-Français,” or just “Canadiens,” was used to
designate the people from Québec. The term, “Canadiens-Français,” evokes dependence
and submission through the former status of the province of Québec as a French colony
(Nouvelle-France). It also refers to a historical period when the British controlled and
dominated Lower Canada (region that now includes the province of Québec.) Sylvie
Chaput’s historical novel, Isabelle’s Notebooks, uses as a background the Patriots
rebellions of 1837-1838, in which the “Canadiens” tried to resist the British assault. Her
main protagonist’s reflection on the relationship between her people and the British
brings up this feeling of being second-class citizens:
There is no shame, we believe, in having been defeated by England. Its longstanding rivalry with France leads us to see the British as an enemy that is every
bit a match for us. Have they not many times triumphed over France and has not
France beaten them many times as well? Are we not the heirs of a history in every
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way as glorious as their own? Are we not their equals? (…) But in truth, they
disdain us, for they see us as mere colonists and well below the French
themselves in stature. (98-99)
This quotation brings up the main inferiority complex that “Canadiens Français” still
continued to experience during the “période de la Grande Noirceur”: the feeling of being
“bastardized” versions of the French from France because the British thought so.
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I would like to argue that Tremblay’s east end symbolizes the low self-esteem of
“Canadiens-Français” and their general status as “subjects” during the “Grande
Noirceur.” The “dictatorship” of the Catholic Church, its intrusion into the personal lives
of French-Canadians, pushes some individuals to seek a way out of this oppressive
lifestyle. Tremblay’s narrator might be proud of certain aspects of his east end
background, such as his French language, but the lack of cultural venues and clubs on the
east side of Saint-Laurent encourages him to cross the frontier to find what he is craving
for. His resentment towards Anglos because he feels that he needs to speak English when
in the west is softened by the realization that this side of the city allows him to explore
other aspects of his identity. In a strange way, the west side of Saint-Laurent symbolizes
characteristics that are often associated with the “Révolution Tranquille,” the period that
followed the “Grande Noirceur.” During the Révolution Tranquille, which started in 1960
with the end of Maurice Duplessis’s authoritative government and the beginning of Jean
Lesage’s liberal reign, the province of Québec entered the modern world and started to
challenge the influence of the Catholic Church. As a result, art no longer had to be
filtered and cut to fit in with the values promoted by the Church. Taboos associated with
sexuality were also lifted. After the Quiet Révolution the term “Québécois” replaced
“Canadiens-Français.” This change of label erased the ambivalence of being split
between two identities: The French from France and the British heritage of the rest of
Canada. With the erasure of a reference to the subject position of a culture caught
between two Empires, the notion of shame that went along the knowledge of being
“bastardized” versions of the French disappears. The term “Québécois” evokes pride and
independence.
The Frontier between Self and Other: Tremblay, Lacan and the Mirror-Stage
Lacan considers the self as something constituted in the Other. This aspect of Lacan’s
theory helps to understand Tremblay’s representation of his narrator’s identity as well as
the more general identity of the province of Québec. This is why I think the Saint-Laurent
street “frontier” that divides the city of Montreal between East and West is more than a
geographical and cultural division for Tremblay. It also represents the symbolical frontier
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between his “Canadien-Français” background, which would stand for his narrator’s
“Self,” and a newly acquired Québécois identity that would be more associated with his
“Other.” The Other can be associated with the image outside oneself perceived and
identified within the Mirror-stage. The Mirror-stage is a drama "whose internal thrust is
precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject .
. .the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image…to the
assumption of the armour of an alienating identity" (4). While on the east side of SaintLaurent, the narrator experiences insufficiency because he cannot live openly his
homosexuality in an oppressive French-Canadian and Catholic context. He also
experiences insufficiency because this same context discourages artistic innovation and
creativity. This leads him to go through a succession of phantasies that includes “being”
the character who sings along during the listening of his favourite operas in his family’s
living room (“I’m even the conductor…or…a mute character who witnesses with sadistic
joy the woes of others” (13)) or “being” Deborah Kerr who receives Burt Lancaster’s
kisses (in his bedroom): “All that time, of course, Deborah Kerr was decked out in a
lovely tire around her waist, her bathing suit didn’t have a top and she sported a Roman
haircut as well as the beginning of a most becoming moustache…” (20). In both cases,
the narrator’s “fragmented body-image” leads to “the armour of an alienating identity.”
My own interpretation of the narrator’s situation is that the pressure to live up to the
Catholic standards of his French-Canadian background is such that it pushes him
(consciously or not) to look for another identity. This could explain why the Anglophone
west lures him. His anticipation of an unfamiliar world where the different language and
values would allow him to detach himself from “home” is, however, replaced by the
discovery of a world closer to that same “home.”
When Tremblay’s narrator crosses the Saint-Laurent threshold and finds himself in
the west, he expects to be destabilized by new experiences. Apart from illustrating the
narrator’s progressive exposition to this new world, each visited place confronts the
narrator with his own cultural assumptions about his Francophone identity not only in
relation to Anglophones, but also in relation to fellow Francophones who stand out from
the norm because of their adherence to subculture (see detailed description of the
narrator’s nightly journey below). The narrator’s assumption that the west is exclusively
Anglophone is challenged through his meeting with Alan. The overtly nationalist
narrator, who is usually offended if he is not served in his own language, does not even
hesitate to speak to Alan in English. When Alan replies in French to something the
narrator also said in French, the latter is shocked: “I thought you only spoke in English.
We’ve always talked English till now.” Alan: « Si tyu m`avais pârlé français, j`t`ôrais
répondyu en français » (111) (if you had spoken French to me, I would have answered in
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French). Another assumption that is shattered through the narrator’s meeting with Alan is
the idea of an Anglophone west that is exclusively wealthy. The narrator thinks that
Alan’s Anglophone background makes him rich and that he lives in Outremont or
Westmount (wealthy neighbourhoods located on the west side of Saint-Laurent). He
fantasizes that Alan would carry him away to his château in the west, but he turns out to
be a poor Anglo from Pointe Saint-Charles (also on the west side). The narrator discovers
that Anglophones can also share his working-class background and that the west is not
exclusively wealthy. Another discovery that awaits our young protagonist on the western
side of Saint-Laurent is his introduction to Québécois culture. His meeting with
“chansonniers” (folk-singers), playwrights, and actors from his own cultural background
anticipates the emergence of a new cultural voice. Tremblay himself participated in this
cultural revolution through his Belles Soeurs (the first Québécois play that used local
slang).
Tremblay uses the west side of Saint-Laurent to expose his narrator to a new
cultural and social reality for Québec in the 1960s. Leaving his own familiar territory
behind, the narrator crosses apprehensively the Saint-Laurent frontier expecting to meet
the stereotypes of the “other.” In this sense, he is representative of a French-Canadian
mentality that is very closed off from the world and is very suspicious of people who do
not come from a Catholic background. However, the narrator’s realization that his east of
Saint-Laurent background is an identity that is also constituted in the “Other” western
side of Saint-Laurent, symbolizes a new Québécois way of thinking that opens itself more
to the world.
Map of the narrator’s nightly journey
Tremblay goes beyond the mere mentioning of places by specifying the exact location
of each establishment his narrator happens to visit. This close attention to details
emphasizes the narrator’s progress towards adulthood as well as his gradual discovery of
a “new” Québec.
1. Narrator’s house: corner of Cartier and Mont-Royal. (East of Saint-Laurent)
2. Her Majesty’s theatre where Pierrette Alarie sings Juliet in Gounod’s Romeo and
Juliet: Ste-Catherine Street West of Peel, Corner of Guy. (West of Saint-Laurent.)
This is where the narrator meets the Anglophone, Alan.
3. El Cortijo (beatnik Francophone café): Clark Street just down from Sherbrooke.
(West of Saint-Laurent.) This is where the narrator is introduced to the emergence
of a distinctive Québec culture through the chansonniers or folk-singers of the
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1960s. Although the narrator is thunderstruck by this revelation of a culture that
no longer imitates the French from France, he has a hard time fitting in with the
crowd: “Did I belong here with these modern bohemians fuelled by double
espressos? Did I even want to carve out a place for myself?”(83)
4. Quatre Coins du Monde (Gay club): corner of Ste-Catherine and Stanley. (West
of Saint-Laurent). This “[l] ong narrow space in the semi-basement of an old
building” (103), marks the narrator’s first time into a gay club: “I felt myself
being weighed, appraised, and quickly classified as "ordinary"” (104).
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5. The Tropical (Gay club/Drag performances): Peel Street north of Sainte-Catherine
(West of Saint-Laurent). Building that didn’t look like much. Carmen, “the fake
James Dean [who] wore girls boots with stiletto heels” (124) introduces the place
to the narrator and his friends: “Gentlemen—pandemonium, the capital of hell!”
(124) This is where the narrator sees transvestites for the first time. At first, he
wonders, “what all those women were doing in a homosexual bar.” Then, “I
didn’t know you could dress up like that in real life, just for fun on a Saturday
night, to go dancing downtown! What a bizarre idea!” (128)
6. Back to the El Cortijo (West of Saint-Laurent)
7. Tourist Room on Carré Saint-Louis: Saint-Denis Street. This is where Tremblay’s
narrator finally loses his virginity. (East of Saint-Laurent)
8. The Sélect (24 hour diner): Northwest corner of Saint-Denis and Sainte-Catherine
(East of Saint-Laurent) “Everybody who scores on Saturday night goes to the
Sélect at noon on Sunday to show off their trophies” (172).
9. Back to narrator’s house (East of Saint-Laurent)
Works Cited
Chaput, Sylvie. Isabelle’s Notebooks. Trans. Peter Vranckx and Daniel Sloate. Toronto:
Guernica, 2002.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.
Tremblay, Michel. Some Night My Prince Will Come. Trans. Sheila Fischman.
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2004.
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References
Leboeuf, Sophie-Hélène. La Révolution Tranquille a 40 ans. Radio-Canada. March 27,
2007 < http: //www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/dossiers/revolution
tranquille/revolution-tranquille.html>.
Fernand Dumont s`exprime sur la grande noirceur. Société Radio-Canada. March 27,
2007 <http://archives.cbc.ca/IDCC-O-17-12677151/politique_economie/maurice_duplessis>.
Tremblay, Michel. Les Belles Sœurs. Trans. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco.
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974.
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9
IDENT-O-NAUTS #1
“the compass creates the hand”
On Inter-Relations of Self, Words and Places
- and Inter-Cultural Poetry by José F. A. Oliver
by Marc James Müller
compass & twilight
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There is the east far behind my brow. There
is the west a pledge-eye homelan(d)
guid. There is the south dice
box for the hunger. There is the NORTH. No
pierdas el norte. There is eastwest
loaf-ing of the sun. There is the moon
on his surge for the twi-gender. There is
the TALK TIME LESS light
branching of the birds disquiet. There is dew
bread-warmth in the displaced wor(l)d
is silence still. There is the day
so reachable close
(In: nachtrandspuren. 2002, p.12)
Here is a poet, a Lyrical ‘I’, in between cardinal points, between different worlds und
cultures. The poet is: José F. A. Oliver, a writer in two languages. He was born in 1961 in the
Black Forrest, as son of Andalusian immigrants. This circumstance makes him live and work
in even four languages, as he says: German, Spanish, Andalusian, and Alemannic, the dialect
of Germany’s southwest. In his poetry, Oliver reclaims ever new forms and sounds from
language, always looking to give his polyphonic world and self new meaning, new spaces.
Oliver’s creation w:ort, which means in German ‘word’ (wort) and ‘place’ (ort) - and which I
have translated in ‘word’ and ‘world’ - stands, in my opinion, exemplarily for this
undertaking. A word is expression and place at the same time, or, at least, would like to be it.
But, what is the connection between language and place? Why is the wor(l)d displaced for
the intercultural poet? In the first instance, I would like to look at the paradigm shift of
meaning of place and space since the post-modern era.
The main centre of reference in the humanities was in pre-modern times the national
state. Place and places were always described and thought first and foremost in terms of their
national location and their national identity – just as societies and societal conditions were.
However, at the beginning of modernity, and accelerated in the post-modern era, the
development drives from the monolithic, unified and unifying national state, to a conception
of global society, in which spatial references are forfeiting their role as a dominant authority
for certain social occurrences. (cf. SCHROER, p. 161) Spatial differentiations take a smaller
part because they are losing ground in governing the circulation of goods, information and
people. (cf. SCHROER, ibid.) Mass media eclipses an immediate experience of space;
distances between places and events are increasingly shortened, and are oftentimes just one
‘click’ apart. Equally, modern means of transportation have led to an ever faster and less
problematic overcoming of space – which starts already with the invention of the railroad:
“By the railroad, space is killed, and only time is left” says already the early Heinrich eine
Heine. Also, the economic world of modernity became a world beyond space: Particularly,
the international borderless circulation of money provides the opportunity to establish spacespanning social relations ‘fading out’ place continuously (Giddens, Luhmann). The result is:
the overcoming of space as an absolute organisational term, and the end of a conception of
space as a container holding and structuring situations as well as protagonists. Space is not
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territorial anymore. So, where do social and societal processes happen?
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From a sociological perspective, modernity has even caused a multiple spatialization
rather than a loss of space. (cf. SCHROER, p. 164) Different places are now in closer contact,
and each media, after all, creates new media-spaces. Thus, the fundamental development is
not the loss of space but the partition of space and tangible place. Aren’t the cardinal points
in Oliver’s poem so close but nevertheless unreachable for the Lyrical ‘I’? Could displaced
worlds also mean displaced places? Only the next day keeps the promise for it to be really
reachable.
The progressing disappearance of place accompanied with a new spatialization of world
leads, in post-modern discourse, to the notion that space has transformed itself into a
permanent ‘side by side’ organized as a capacious net. As Foucault states, we live in an
epoch of space with simultaneity as its most outstanding attribute. (cf. SCHROER, p. 171)
The new structure also induces a partial loss of time’s leading function: the narrative
coherences consisting of past, present and future only can create and carry less and less sense
(cf. HAN, p. 54) changing to different conflicting time tendencies. They become point-time
or event-time, and thus they are as well shifted abreast. (cf. HAN, ibid)
The ‘side by side’ as a main organisational structure of space and time leads in postmodern thought, as Vilém Flusser says, to the concept of world as point-universe. This
universe is by no means at all atopic but rather marked by a plurality of spaces. In terms of
that, plurality and fragmentation are considered, not without good reason, as symptoms of the
present. This also means a reciprocal annihilation of absolute understanding and knowledge –
former clearness and certainty forfeit their validity. The loss of the absolute ken, is
accompanied by a loss of borders, at least in their pre-modern and modern meaning. The
antiquated relevance of borders, as Günther Anders states, is the definite and sharp partition
which does not allow any in-between, any undecided. Post-modern borders became a space
2
on their own; well known is Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space, where contradictions can be
negotiated, entering dialogues, in place of strict separations.
Migrants also find themselves as being in-between. After leaving their home-land they
see their place of immigration not (yet) as their new home; and they are excluded by an
absent acceptance of the majority. Additionally, after a long lasting stay at a new country the
binding to the home-land weakens; and the acceptance there for the migrants is usually
diminishing over time. By the same token, members of second and third migrant-generations
are located in a space of in-between as well, pieced together by differing, often conflicting
and supposedly incompatible parts of their ‘personal mosaic’ - at least from the perspective
of dominant society. In Oliver’s poem compass & twilight is the mentioned lack of an
accepting home expressed in his creation heimatt, a wordplay which conveys in German two
meanings: home-land (Heimat) and dull or languid (matt). Home is for the Lyrical ‘I’
associated with debility and weakness, meaning, from my point of view, either a weakening
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108 search for a place following just a notion of home without ever being able to reach it, to live
it. Home here is not a sustaining factor but generally drawn into question.
On the other hand, fragmentation and plurality of a liquid society, to quote Zygmunt
Bauman, entails beside new complexities and lacking means for orientation also an expansion
of individual possibilities for play, choice, and change – generally only for members of the
dominant parts of society. The borderless Third Space is not a societal accepted sphere for
migrants but an inner space, which is constructed and kept up for oneself and for one’s own
group. For migrants, the Third Space is not predominantly a possibility to negotiate and
combine contradictions but rather at first a place of their containment and exclusion by
majority. The societal space allotted to migrants is limited. Even though the second and third
generation grew up in a post-modern, pluralistic society, the play of free choice, in and with a
borderless world, is difficult for them to perform most of the time.
Not only are worlds and places displaced, but so are words. Words, in a very practical
meaning, are at first means of communication, of understanding. In another poem with the
title listening again Oliver writes:
you at one end of language
I at the other
in-between word and wor(l)dly
no centre no beginning
I at the end
is language you in the other
(In: nachtrandspuren. 2002, p. 113)
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Here, language and ’I’ are linked together, not absolutely but relatively in communication
with one ‘Other. The ‘I’ is constructed in and by words and language of a counterpart. In a
next step, I would like to look at the connection of identity and language.
The term ‘identity’ has experienced`, especially in the 1960s, a real boom of definitions.
Many different schools of thought claimed it for there system of concepts. All the different
attempts to define identity have in common a concept always remaining more or less vague,
with only a few core-points endorsed by all theories. Such a central element of a modern
identity-concept seems to me a process-like character. For instance, Jean Claude Kaufmann
says: “Identity is no predetermined condition but constitutes itself every day anew by
identification.” (cf. KAUFMANN, p. 28)
According to the German sociologist Lothar Krappmann, an individual builds identity in
interaction with others, thus in dialogue. Thereby, the dialogue-partners agree on different
social roles. The formation and stabilization of the individual identity is carried out by taking
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a certain role-distance to the negotiated role-model during the particular communicational
109 situation. Role-distance means here an interpretation of the role, which diverges gradually
from the dialogue-partner’s expectation and the role-norm respectively. However, can an
equal dialogue at all take place between minorities and the majority against the background
of partial social exclusion?
Another fact bating the dominance of social interaction for identity-formation and stabilization is the pullback of collectively experienced and shared social space in postmodern societies. (cf. HEITMEYER, p. 48) The increasing fragmentation and diversification
also lead to a successive disbandment of social-spatial coherences, especially among urban
living environments and conditions, and in such a way that a gradual loss of certainty and
orientation, in particular social groups, are noticeable. Eventually, this results in a damage of
general social cohesiveness and anomy causing social tension within society. (cf.
HEITMEYER, p. 262) Social norms and values are initially affirmed and bound by social
involvement and interaction. (cf. DURKHEIM, cited after HEITMEYER, p. 48). The
decreasing social cohesiveness also complicates negotiation processes about (new) shared
social norms in changing post-modern societies. From my point of view, the notion of
identity mainly constructed by social roles and role-distances
is too fixed and constricts
interpretations regarding minority groups.
Going back to Oliver’s poem listening again it strikes that words and dialogue between
‘I’ and ‘other’ have no centre and no beginning. From my perspective, these lines imply a
reference to a communication which has not started so far. ‘I’ and ‘other’ do not
communicate, at least not about the same, shared topic. However, both are constructed in and
by each other’s language, both construct their counterpart, who is not an equal dialoguepartner yet. For me, the title of the poem is like a request: listening again, more careful,
closer, and starting to begin an equal communication in a society where certain groups are
excluded from a mutual dialogue.
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Migrants usually have more languages at their disposal. With multilingualism the attempt
was made to distinguish between language of communication and language of identification.
(cf. JANICH, p. 29) In my opinion, such a differentiation makes sense primarily for the first
migrant generation. In the following generations typically both languages – mother tongue
and German – are conjointly involved in communication and even more in identification. For
both linguistical and cultural worlds combined by for instance José F. A. Oliver stand
exemplarily terms such as der Mond, which is of male gender in German, and its feminized
form die Mondin – a reference to the Spanish la luna. We already read in the first poem
compass & twilight: “there is the moon on his surge for the twi-gender”. In another poem
titled moon change, gender act Oliver writes:
and moon and mooness and moon
lunares
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like coinage in the trousers pocket
(affirmation of the easy closeness) jingles
(In: Austernfischer, Marinero, Vogelfrau. 1997, p.52)
Both languages, both cultures are here naturally related to the Lyrical ‘I’. Both are close,
and this closeness is very easy to establish, it is even constantly a part of the ‘I’, a companion
such as the moon (or the mooness). And, both worlds sound with every step the Lyrical I
takes, without the possibility to distinguish the differing derivation of their sound.
Now, I want to turn my attention to formation and variation of individual identity and
how and to what extent the practical use of language comes into play. One consensus within
the modern research on identity was the presumption that identity is a process. But how is
this process being performed? What is tool, and what is medium?
In this context, the theory on narrative identity construction seems to me very productive.
It assumes that identity processes are based on real possibilities, resources and power
relations, but that they are actually performed in a symbolic space – symbolic in terms of
semiotic. (cf. KRAUS, p. 160) Accordingly, identity is not to be constructed in the mind but
at the body, that is in the action, the objects we act or interact with and which are assembled
by us. (cf. KRAUS, p. 161) Language is also part of this symbolically formed world of
objects. We narrate about us, and we narrate ourselves. In the centre of the concept of
narrative identity stands the notion that there is no reflection, no experience of oneself
beyond language. (cf. KRAUS, p. 161) In this case, language does not carry the inside
outwards but first constructs the inside. At the beginning of the theoretical formulation by
Ricœur and others was the assumption that the process-goals of self-narration were continuity
and coherence. Individuals were organizing, arranging, and forming their experiences in a
narrative fashion establishing a “unity of life”. (cf. KRAUS, ibid) Also, narrative psychology
has had decisive influence on the development of such an identity theory. From a
psychological perspective, narrations are always related to social performance making past
5
experiences “socially visible”, and enable the individual to motivate one’s expectations
towards forthcoming events. (cf. KRAUS, p. 162)
However, in post-modern times past and present are not always connectable in a coherent
and continuous manner. The individual persists on the potentiality of a great number of selfnarrations as well as on the freedom to leave those unconnected. Temporal linearity has also
lost its structuring function in post-modern self-discourse offering the possibility to narrate
elements of the unaffiliated, disparate and incommensurable. On the other hand, it became
more complicated to make sense out of oneself. (cf. KRAUS, p. 173)
Here, the dialogue-partner holds a considerable role as well. They become a quasi-author
of the narrated situational identity of the other; as we have read in Oliver’s poem on the other
on the opposite end of language. According to Habermas, the parameters of “selfidentification” must be acknowledged inter-subjectively. “Identity can only be built on
attributes accepted by the environment as such.” (cf. JANICH 2003, p. 29) In respect to the
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earlier mentioned identity formation of minorities and their exclusion from an equal
111 communication with a majority, the narrative identity construction ought to be critically
revised in a similar way like the role-theory.
I hold the opinion that there must be some sort of identity formation beyond immediate
dialogue and reciprocal acknowledged roles or self-concepts. Certainly, writing has always
been another way of self-narration; each writer will always narrate themselves to a certain
extent. However, how far does this self-narration go, and which role does it take in relation or in contrast - to the actual character of communication between a minority writer and/ or
Lyrical ‘I’ as textual minority persona and dominant society? Naturally, the poetic text, the
Lyrical ‘I’, has a very close relationship to the author. Oliver puts it as follows:
I write because I-estuary I always was, language-river I am, and lope-wards
sound I will be, overflowed by the I, in between all the other Is, for any clear emotion,
which devises me.
(From: 13 Saiten, die meine Verse stimmen. In: fernlautmetz. 2000, p. 112)
In these words ‘writing’ is associated with movement and mobility allowing the author to
find ever new forms of self-awareness, self-expression and self-positioning. In my opinion,
what is of central importance is self-mobility for Oliver as an exemplary member of a
minority group in Germany.
Æ Conclusion Keywords:
- immobility of identity for minority groups
- negotiation of different/ differing fields of identity in language/ text
- autonomous ‘dialogue’ of minority writers with the majority in and through literature
- text becomes a space of identity/ Third Space
- deconstruction of language to word-spaces in Oliver’s poetry
6
- naturalness of negotiation of contradictions
- productive interrelation of word and place referring reciprocally to each other as in Oliver’s
poem on a Brazilian friend in Germany:
note for a brazilian in munich
about the ear of places
speaks Ignacio before the hybrid
self-word of the poet. Always
when he lays the south
his pencil leads the north
creates the compass the hand
(In: nachtrandspuren. 2002, p. 109)
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7
Fast Forward Nation 1
Fast Forward Nation
If you use the fast forward button, the action speeds up. Details are lost, but certain
relationships and actions become visible that are otherwise not noticed. For example, if we fast
forward through a famous movie such as Polanski’s Chinatown, we can see that the antagonist
cop and ex-cop, Lou the lieutenant and Gittes the private eye, can be seen walking together
“entrained,” as the psychologists say. That is, they are walking together in lockstep, like men on
a military parade. But this lockstep phenomenon is not noticeable when the movie is watched at
normal speed. It is there and it is not there at the same time. It is visible and invisible, conscious
and unconscious, an order without any conscious planning.
Ostensibly, the two men are rivals and even enemies. They once worked together, we
learn, but now one has stayed with the police force, while the other got out and started a business
as detective, and while Gittes the private detective has, as one of the cops puts it, “done well for
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113 himself,” Lou the lieutenant, who stayed with the police, has also done well for himself,
becoming lieutenant and climbing the ladder of authority. Each dislikes the other. The
lieutenant dislikes and envies the private eye Gittes, and Gittes looks down on the lieutenant for
working in the low-class distract with its petty criminals and sordid crimes of an impoverished
and desperate part of the community: what Gittes has escaped.
The two men are hostile to each other, too, because they are involved in the same case,
and each sees the other as meddling and concealing and naively being implicated in the case in
ways that neither is smart enough to understand. Interestingly, in the shocking final scene, the
two divide the final words of the action (with some intervention by Gittes’ assistant). They are
“entrained” again, at the end.
While they are envious and hostile and in conflict with each other, still, they are seen
walking together lockstep, imitating and conforming to each other’s movements. Clearly, more
unites these two men than divides them. Without knowing it, they literally walk together in the
valley of death. The two men are the same, but, truth to tell, they hate each other.
* * *
“Object Thinking” is a concept I develop in two books of mine, entitled Male Envy and
13 Ways of Looking at Images. By “Object Thinking” I mean a way of visualizing reality. It is a
way of understanding reality, but “understanding” usually refers to an abstract process of
intellection, and what I mean is something much more sensory and emotional. “Visualizing”
means “seeing with the mind’s eye”—the form/trans/forming of mental images—not, in other
words, abstractly thinking about things. And what Object Thinking shows is a model, a way of
visualizing the world. In this model, reality appears as a vast collection of material objects in
space, objects that are outside the self and that can be measured, quantified, and located in a
fixed framework of space. All things have location, in other words. What holds these material
objects together is the impersonal laws of nature.
Fast Forward Nation 2
In precisely parallel fashion, human society is visualized in the same way: as a vast
collection of individual persons held together by the impersonal laws of the market, by the need
to use one another in certain ways. For Object Thinking, there is a close synchrony and
isomorphy between the laws of nature and the laws of the market. This isomorphy goes back to
the first important attempts to understand capitalism in the eighteenth century. Thus Edmund
Burke pronounced in his Thoughts on Scarcity (1795) that the “laws of commerce” are “the laws
of nature,” and “the laws of nature” are, in turn, “the laws of God.”
What Object Thinking shows us is that everything is separate from everything else.
Every person is separate from every other person. In the precise formulation of Jacques Derrida,
who was a classic Object Thinker, “tout autre est tout autre”—“all other is all other”—or, more
exactly, everything is separate from everything.
Object Thinking begins with the triumph of capitalism, and with it, the emergence of
modern science, as the system of measuring and controlling nature, the objects of which nature is
composed. The first great Object Thinker, then, was Descartes, and with Descartes comes the
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114 classic problem of philosophy over the last several hundred years, since the triumph of
capitalism and the emergence of modern science, namely the problem of “perceptual
acquaintance,” as it is sometimes termed. To put it in the form of a question, What is the
difference between inside and outside? What is the difference between what is inside us and
what is outside us? And by “inside the self” I clearly do not mean “les petites cellules grises,” as
Hercule Poirot puts it, the neurons, veins, organs and fluids and bones that are found when you
open up a body. I mean, of course, our subjectivity, our so-called “inner life,” and by outside the
self I mean that very domain of objects in space that I referred to a moment ago—material things
spread out in an ever-widening vastness of space.
This is the so-called “subject-object” relationship, and it is, as I said, the basic problem of
Westenr philosophy from Descartes to, I suppose, the present. No philosopher has figured it out.
How can two radically different “substances,” to use the Cartesian terminology (res cogitans and
res extensa), be in contact with each other—the subjective domain of consciousness, which can
hardly be said to occupy space, and the domain of material objects spread out around us
“outside” the subjective domain somehow containing it, just as, somehow, our subjectivity is
“contained” by our body. It must be emphasized that the subject-object relationship is, in
practice, a variation on the fundamental relation of Object Thinking, namely person-thing. The
relation of person to things is the functional, day-to-day, routine form of the philosophers’
“subject-object relationship.”
There is a logical problem with the philosophy of the subject-object relation, and that is
that if we begin by assuming that subject and object are outside of each other, so to speak, we are
never going to be able to connect them without disposing of our assumption of separation. “Tout
autre est tout autre” must become “tout autre c’est la même chose.” The weakness of Object
Thinking is that it depends upon a medium. That is, the subject-object relation, which governs
all relations in Object Thinking, actually has an invisible third member: it is subject-spaceobject. The object is separated by a space from the subject. What is inside is separated by a
Fast Forward Nation 3
space from what is outside. And indeed, to be an object is to be isolated in space, to be isolable
in space, so that reality is a sequence of separations made possible by space.
Space, however, is a problematic concept. What is space? No one knows. Space is
visualized, in so far as it can be visualized, as a container, as the inside of a container. But what
is a container that has no walls, no containing reference points? The notion is inherently
unintelligible, even if it is somehow intuitively familiar.
As long as the spaces of the earth were remote, the conviction that everything is separate
from everything else made a certain kind of sense, especially under the regime of capitalism. For
capitalism in its expansive phase in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the profits could be
collected at home, and the source of those profits, mainly in slavery, forced labor, and the
plunder of India, could be safely regarded as on the other side of space, so to speak—separate.
Not here. Not where the subject is, the subject who “consumes” and enjoys the profits of that
violence. This person-thing relation forms the model for every relationship in the regime of
capitalist culture.
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If we press the fast forward button we witness the collapse of space. By speeding up
what we see, distances condense and vanish, space contracts. One point is closer to another
point. To travel faster is to shrink space. It is to make things more evidently and obviously
connected, interconnected, aspects of a single thing, as the two men in Polanski’s great film
Chinatown become parallel men sharing the same rhythm and to that extent being two nods of a
single identity, united even though they hate each other.
The primary implication of space, of Object Thinking, of the subject-space-object
paradigm, is hostility. What is outside us is not us. It is not who we are. It is, in our mind, less
than we are. It is set over against us, and while we may be dependent upon it for our existence,
we are not it, we are separate, and our task in this life is to control objects in space, to use them.
And in this way of thinking, other people must be understood not as recognizable subjectivities,
but as objects which either threaten us or that offer advantages to us, if we are smart enough and
powerful enough to make use of them. We are in a hostile world. We are in a contested world.
Space is a field of aggression, a space of contestation, an arena, in which we must attack
dominate, control, and use what is outside us. We must “consume” it.
In particular, it is assumed that the primary relationship with others is a hostile one. We
either use others or are used by them. We either control others, or they control us. It is true that
we can form alliances with others and share the results of our control-power, but our purpose in
such alliances is to dominate and control others whom we are allied against, and even our allies
are allies only in so far as we have negotiated control with them. They are allies because they
have something that is useful to us and we are strong enough to win a certain place in the
alliance.
The assumption that we are hostile to others and to our world is surely the governing
assumption of capitalist social relations, no matter how much love we may feel for certain others
Fast Forward Nation 4
or how much appreciation we may feel for the natural world, no matter how good we may feel
toward our employees, boss, or banker.
But the obvious truth is that we have far more in common with one another than anything
that divides us. This is most obvious in the case of sheer survival, because humanity has now
reached a point where destroying others inevitably means destroying oneself; to destroy the
object is to destroy the subject who destroys. And what the era of global communication
increasingly demonstrates is that space is relative, not absolute. Nothing is really separate. We
are connected and connected and connected. We are really one nation as we are one species, and
that species is one of many species which all have more in common than they have with nonliving nature. We are one species as we are one earth, and at last, perhaps the human race is
beginning to realize this fact. The world “shrinks to an immediate whole,” as the American poet
Wallace Stevens puts it.
But to realize the fact that we are indissolubly one and that nothing is separate is so
anxiety-arousing that to confront this truth is to risk death. It means confronting all the anxieties
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116 and fears accumulated from the past, with its obsessive belief in difference, that the utter
difference of others means our insecurity, means hostility and threat to survival. The age of
global communication has thus produced what my teacher, the great Canadian intellectual,
Northrop Frye, called “a hell of unparalleled hysteria.” The realization of interconnection has
produced a crisis in every aspect of human existence, including religion, which typically
visualizes the divine as “God” understood as the ultimately other, the ultimately separate. Thus
the ultimate anxiety that God is “absolute other” must be allowed to express itself before being
discarded, for if God were indeed absolute other, there is no way we could even know of God’s
existence, in whatever form we conceive the divine: God would be merely nothing if God were
indeed “absolute other.” But once this “absolute otherness” disintegrates, the truth that the
divine, however we choose to constitute the divine, is part of ourselves and part of nature, and
not more absolute other than anything or anybody is absolute other, or than the two men
entrained with each other in the fast forward movie of Chinatown are absolutely other, even if
they, like men who do not know themselves, think they are.
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Performing Identity/Crossing Borders Conference
May 2007
The Silent Presence: Asian Female Domestic Workers and Cyprus in the new
Europe
“You know, you’ve got to compromise. It’s a marriage; and it’s a marriage where
the bride doesn’t know the groom! And you have to get married, and as life goes on,
you’ll find out whether you can cope or not in compromising...” –Greek Cypriot
employer on the relationship between Asian domestic workers and employers
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What happens when transnational movements bring new interactions between
locals and a variety of “others,” particularly when the prevailing local reality is one of
ethnic division and conflict between the locals themselves? More specifically, what
happens to a person’s ethnic, gender and class identity when they cross an
international boundary and are “reclassified” as temporary, low-pay home workers?
In Cyprus, the easternmost border of the EU, women from the Philippines, Sri Lanka
and India are almost exclusively engaged in domestic work. For most of them, this
means they become socially and economically marginalized. Although the successful
integration of migrant workers in European societies remains a key objective of the
EU given that in most countries of the Union many migrants experience social
exclusion, prejudice and discrimination, migrant women continue to be particularly
vulnerable in peripheral economies and societies in Europe which also happen to be
the economies where they are most likely to find work.
Since the late 1980’s, the proportion of women in the global movement for
work has increased dramatically, with more women than ever leaving their families
and homes for work in other countries to support their families back home. At the
same time, the kinds of occupations available for these women are often low pay,
temporary, and in the service sector, resulting in the feminization of poverty and
migration on a global scale (Castels and Miller 2003; Brettell 2003). The
globalization of the economy has also meant that female migrants now end up
working in new places outside of the highly industrialized world. Even in a small
country like Cyprus with under one million inhabitants, domestic workers currently
make up almost 2% of the entire population, with over 12,000 Asian women working
legally as domestics and thousands more being undocumented domestic helpers. The
rapid pace of change brought about by a new influx of foreign people in areas of the
world such as the Mediterranean—areas which have only recently become zones of
immigration rather than emigration—has contributed to rising social tensions and new
social issues in many countries (see Anthias and Lazaridis 2000). Cyprus has now
found itself at the center of emerging, internal debates about belonging, inclusion,
citizenship and racism, and these debates come at a time when the small Republic
strives to conform to its obligations of EU harmonization while continues to struggle
with its unsolved “Cyprus problem.”
Perhaps the most telling aspect of how migrant women are viewed by Greek
Cypriots is by their marked absence and invisibility in daily life. Migrant women are
visibly absent in public spaces, much of which continues to be dominated by “the
Cyprus Problem.” When they do surface in political and public discourse, they are
most often constructed problematically. They are visible to the public gaze on
Sundays, their only contractual day off, and they congregate in areas not used by
Cypriots like the downtown parks. For this reason the research also explores the
social activities and living/recreation spaces of transmigrant women, mainly those
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May 2007
spaces relegated to the border areas/buffer zone of Nicosia which are in large part
“non-spaces”(vis-a-vis Greek Cypriots), as the city center has in large part become
“ghetto-ized” as a direct result of the political division between Greek and Turkish
Cypriots. The research also considers immigrant women’s representation in political
and social spaces; in other words, how migrant women in Cyprus are represented (or
not) in popular media and in official discourse.
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Asian women are particularly important to consider in relation to immigration
in Cyprus because they face particular issues by virtue of being female, foreign, and
poor in a very male-dominated and status oriented society. I would argue that it is the
state’s legal classification of these women upon crossing through Cyprus’ borders that
define their experience in Cyprus, directly creating the conditions for their
marginalization within the Cypriot society. Legislative directives and policy
distinguish women seeking work as domestics from men seeking work in all other
occupations for which they are channeled into in Cyprus. As Asian migrant women,
they come to Cyprus channeled through the Ministry of the Interior rather than
through the Ministry of Labor and, as such, are ineligible to unionize locally. Asian
women are also required by law to live within the private homes of their employers,
making monitoring of their living and working conditions almost impossible. Most
importantly, Asian women are brought to Cyprus for work exclusively as domestic
servants. This particular situation vis-a-vie the state actually puts women at an
extreme disadvantage as wage laborers and as humans, creating the ideal situation for
women to be exploited. It is the racialized and gendered policy at the level of the
state which directly influences the social reception of female migrants in the host
country. As Donnan and Wilson so eloquently summarize, “…as borders may be
both bridge and barrier between these [economic, political and social] spaces, so their
crossing can be both enabling and disabling, can create opportunities or close them
off,” (1999; 107).
A social consequence of this state policy is that all Asian females are
automatically seen as domestic workers. Although many Asian women working in
Cyprus are educated and have led other lives in their home countries as teachers,
nurses, clerical workers and mothers, in Cyprus all Asian women are assumed to be
domestic workers—there is simply no room for an alternative definition of their
identity. Entire nationalities are commonly collapsed into a referent for a domestic
worker. So strong are national stereotypes that the word “domestic worker” in Greek
is often expressed as I Filipinesea mou, as one Cypriot woman quipped, I Filipinesa
mou einai Srilankesa1. Clearly, to see a Filipina woman or a woman from Sri Lanka is
not to see a person from these countries, but rather to see a domestic worker. As a
Greek-Cypriot friend of mine explained a personal story of hers when she went to the
bank to change money with her Filipino-American friend who was visiting her from
the United States, the bank teller asked in Greek, “how long has this woman been
working for you?”
Asian women experience racism in Cyprus in a number of ways, which I
explored through ethnographic fieldwork with Asian domestics and Greek-Cypriot
employers between 2002 and 2004. Ethnic stereotypes inform preferences for
particular nationalities of women in relation to their supposed “natural” propensity for
1
Translation, “My ‘girl’ from the Philippines is a Sri Lankan”.
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Performing Identity/Crossing Borders Conference
May 2007
domestic service, cleanliness, and their ability to be congenial. Women from the
Philippines are often constructed as “favorable” in the sense that they are clean, quiet,
less likely to complain and Christian, while Sri Lankan women may be preferred by
other employers because they are seen as “less demanding,” and “not as outspoken
about their rights” as Filipina women. When I asked one Greek-Cypriot employer
about her criteria for hiring a housemaid and how she finally came to decide on who
she would hire, she explained how the employment agency helped her:
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I was thinking about this [issue]. I wanted to bring someone who wanted to
work. To work in the house, to clean everything. And I wanted her to be
good, not just to make like that [flips her hand]. I asked the woman there [at
the agency] to advise me, because I had to choose between Sri Lankan girls or
Filipine. And the girl there told me that—I had the previous experience with
Sri Lankan girls and she couldn’t do anything properly, I always advised her
how to do things, okay? But the agency woman there told me, yes, well, the
Filipino girls understand more easily…if you tell them once something, they
understand and they do it properly. The Sri Lankan girls you must tell her 5
times, these [women] are not clever. But, Sri Lankan girls are always [willing]
to work. With these girls, Filipino girls, you have to accept the fact—she told
me, I remember how she [her current maid from the Philippines] was telling
[me], looking at me and saying that, “[just] because I am poor, I am [still] a
woman like you!”—They don’t see you like their boss, they have, you
know…[pauses] they don’t accept that they are servants or housemaids, or
lower people than you. They feel they are equal, but because they are poor,
okay, they will work for you! The Sri Lankeese are more obedient. And [the
agent told me that] you must accept the fact that this Filipina you will bring,
she will be like that! She will not be like a Sri Lankan and say ‘okay madam’
and go to do [whatever you want them to do]. And I was wondering what to
do!
Here, stereotypes are reproduced by authority figures, the “knowing” and experienced
professionals who encounter Asian women looking for work in Cyprus on a daily
basis. Because of their position of power and authority in relation to Asian women
they are relied on by prospective Cypriot employers as carriers of knowledge through
experience, and in this way are more dangerous at validating and normalizing
stereotyped ideas about Asian women.
Objectified and mistrusted, Asian women are ultimately defined as xenes (outsiders)
who do not belong in Cyprus. Many Greek Cypriot employers I spoke with lamented
that they could not hire a local Cypriot women to do the cleaning and child minding
that they
-I’ve had several, yeah, and I haven’t been always lucky! [laughs] No, no;
even the first one I brought—my God! Believe me, I have to tell you
something here; I tried to get a Cypriot, even to work during the day, not at
night because I could get a babysitter…so I would have preferred to find a
Cypriot. But at that time [her daughter was 11 and her son just born] it was
impossible, you know, to have someone every day. They [i.e., Cypriot
women] prefer to work in different houses so they get more money. And
some of them, they work in two houses a day. You have to pay a lot, a lot of
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Performing Identity/Crossing Borders Conference
May 2007
money to have a Cypriot working for you daily…to have a Cypriot, daily,
even four times a week, it costs so much.
-But why would you prefer a Cypriot woman?
-Because they know how to work! They finish early; I was very, very happy
with the Cypriots, they know the house, they know how to clean! The first one
[foreign domestic worker] I brought, I don’t think she ever lived in a house, a
proper house—most probably she was living in the jungle. She came [from
Sri Lanka] in her sari—I gave her clothes, of course. I think she was a
Buddhist—no, she was a Buddhist because she was praying, and her room had
a funny smell; most probably she was lighting those things? And she couldn’t
speak English! Ahhh! When she came, she was supposed to know how to
clean, she was supposed to know how to speak English, how to cook, how to
manage children—she knew nothing!
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This employer’s first experience with a culturally foreign woman left her frustrated
and at the same time feeling culturally superior. This employer felt a strong
preference for hiring a local Cypriot woman for a number of reasons. First, she would
have not had the cultural and communication issues that she had with this woman
from Sri Lanka. Above and beyond communication, however, Cypriot women are
culturally familiar with expectations of cleanliness, maintaining order, and how best
to achieve these. Defined in relation to xeni (foreign female), Cypriots are kin and
countrymen—familiar and to be trusted as insiders. As an unwritten rule, one’s own
countrymen/women are more easily trusted and are therefore the best choice when it
comes to seeking domestic help. Yet this employer goes several steps further to
exoticize this woman. The idea that she came straight from the jungle removes her
completely from civilization—and therefore humanity—situating her as savage,
closer to animals, and stripping her of culture and indeed that which makes us human.
Since Cyprus joined the European Union in May 2004, Greek-Cypriots
emphasize their identities as European and differentiate from Turks (and thus
Turkish-Cypriots with whom they share their small country), the Middle East, and the
East in general. The added dimension of “visually-foreign” people from Asia has
complicated existing identity politics and opened new debates about racism and
xenophobia within the Greek-Cypriot community. However, the idea of immigrants
gaining citizenship in Cyprus is still a sensitive issue for most Greek-Cypriots. It is
important to emphasize that “immigration” itself is already a highly emotionally
charged concept for Greek-Cypriots, linked to the 1974 war and the arrival of
mainland Turkish settlers in the north of Cyprus. While Turkey still looms large in
popular fears about the future of the Republic of Cyprus for Greek-Cypriots,
immigrants are the new “eastern Other”; A survey of Greek Cypriots done by the RAI
market research company in 2002 found that 81% of Greek-Cypriots polled believed
that social problems in the country were a direct result of the influx of foreigners to
the island.2 Even the media in Cyprus has gone so far as to call the recent influx of
Asian migrants “The Second Invasion,” the first being the Turkish invasion of 1974.3
2
3
The Cyprus Weekly, November 22-28, 2002, p. 12
This comparison aired on all major local television news stations in 2002.
5
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Despite the fact that the recent media attention has continued to focus almost
exclusively on the two largest ethnic communities on the island—the Greek-Cypriot
majority and the Turkish-Cypriot minority—and its continued political conflict, the
very presence of “visibly foreign” Others has recently begun to open up the Greek
Cypriot society to issues of race and racism. Over the last several years, a small
number of concerned Greek Cypriot citizens have formed support and outreach
organizations to try and begin confronting racism in relation to immigrants. The
media has also begun to present stories on migrant women, the treatment of foreign
maids, the issues of trafficking in women, media racism, etc.4 There is a recent, albeit
quiet, debate which is beginning to create awareness among Cypriots about their
everyday practices towards foreign “others” on the island.
That growing awareness is coupled with legal pressure from supranational
bodies like the European Union to accept and tolerate difference. Perhaps given
enough time, Greek-Cypriots will become more open and tolerant of the diverse
social reality that is around them. However, the ability for Greek-Cypriots to
conceptualize or accept members of particular ethnic groups as equal citizens may not
be so quick in coming, particularly if South Asians continue to be channeled to
Cyprus as unskilled service workers and continue to be severely economically and
socially marginalized as they are today.
References Cited and Used
Anthias, Floya and Gabriella Lazaridis. 2000. Gender and Migration in southern
Europe: Women on the Move. New York: Berg.
Brettell, Caroline. 2003. Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism,
Ethnicity and Identity. New York: Altamira Press.
Castels, Stephen and Mark Miller. 2003. The Age of Migration: International
Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Guilford Press.
Donnan, Hastings and Thomas Wilson. 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation
and State. New York: Berg.
Kearney, Michael. 2004. Changing Fields of Anthropology. Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers.
Pappas-Deluca, Katina. 1999. “Transcending Gendered Boundaries: Migration for
Domestic Labor in Chile,” in Gender, Migration and Domestic Service. Pp.
98-114. Routledge.
Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and
Domestic Work. Stanford University Press.
Stolcke, Verena 1995. Talking culture: new boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in
Europe. Current Anthropology 36:1-24.
4
For example, March 24, 2006 edition of the Cyprus Mail highlights the need for
journalists to be more culturally sensitive and to avoid reproducing ethnic stereotypes.
Srbinovska (University of “Sts Cyril and Methodius”
Republic of Macedonia)
Hermeneutic approach to the concepts of identity, power and their
commitment in the discourse of contemporary philosophy
Borders and limits are mere lines; they are
an interface which intervenes in the process
of appropriation of geographic and
symbolic territories. Because they have no
essence in themselves, they are impossible to
locate if they don’t refer by delimitation to
some possession of territory or of land. An
identity is something that nests itself into an
imaginary territory first and real territory
only thereafter. For this, it needs and uses a
narration which brings about foundation
myths, stories about origin, images,
representations and fixed interpretation of
the history. Through stories and pictures,
borders are drown.
Rada Ivekovic
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1. ‘In front of a Law’s door ’
At the beginning of my speech, I would like to point out the crucial problem of the
concepts through which I can speak about ‘the history of passports, and especially ‘a
Macedonian case in that history’. The passport becomes the crucial symbol of moving
and traveling. According to it, it could be a symbol of transition from one event to
another or the instrument of narration that could be observed as a process of moving in
the space of the text and through the time of the story. According to Gloria Anzaldua, we
are constantly in movement, from the world of the origin, to the world of our education,
from place of the work to the place where we live, and all that passing worlds produce the
story of our identity.
Because of that, I will cite this very interesting comparison from Nigel Rapport who
pointed out to a serious and interesting relation between anthropology and narratology:
“To the anthropological ear, the notion that anthropology and narratology might meet
under rubric of an overriding discipline of ‘iterology’ – a sciences of journeys-as Michel
Butor once suggested (1972:7), should frivolous at best.“ The author argued that there is
1
a crucial relation and logic of making a bond between the notion of study of social life
and study of story-telling and he puts the equality between them under the concepts of
movement and identity. The meaning of identity as a value and traveling, movement from
one place to another are united in the many simple things such as passport.
It could be used as a symbol of identification, although it points out to some national,
ethnical or regional image that is summarized in this very specific law document that also
poses the question of equivalence and translatability.
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I will remember you of a parable that is included in the novel Der Prozeß from Franz
Kafka. The title of the story is “The man in front of the door of the Law“. This parable is
from the part of the novel in which the representative of God, the priest recounted the
story of a man from the village who has to negotiate with the doorkeeper. The man from
the village is asking to pass through the door of the Law, but the doorkeeper is not
capable to permit him to pass the door and to enter inside now. The peasant asked him if
he could enter inside later, but, after that he received very simple answer: „Maybe“.
Because the door leading to the law was always open, the man tried to look in. Watching
his effort, the doorkeeper said to him: “If you are so attracted from that which is inside
you can try to go in. But you have to be careful, I’m powerful, I’m the first, but in front
of the other rooms you can meet many others doorkeepers who could be more powerful
than me. The image of the last one who is the most powerful I couldn’t stand.
The man didn’t expect too many difficulties, the law has to be reachable to everyone
and always, but looking at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, at his big sharp nose, long thin
barb, he decided to wait the permission for the entrance. The man took the small chair
from the doorkeeper and sat in front of the door of the Law. There, he spent all his
lifetime, days and years. He tried many times to enter and he made his solicitation with
the request. The doorkeeper asked him about his village (normally with indifferent tone
of questions as them put the great masters), and at the end, he usually answers that he
couldn’t put him inside.
The man tried to corrupt him with everything that is worth for the doorkeeper. The
doorkeeper took different things with explanations that he did that to make him sure that
he has done everything.
Many years the man was looking at the doorkeeper. He forgot the other doorkeepers.
At the beginning, he became unhappy and loudly damned his situation, and than, when he
became old, he grumbles all the time. At the end of his life, he became childish, than
blind and he couldn’t see anymore if it is a day or a night around him. Before he died, he
summarized all his experience and he pose the question that he didn’t ask before. The
doorkeeper had to banded his body to hear the man, because the differences in the growth
between them became bigger and bigger. “What would you like to know? “- asked the
doorkeeper.
2
“You are too insatiable“. The peasant answer: “Well, all the people want to pass the
door of the Law, but I don’t understand why they did not come here.
The doorkeeper saw that the man was at the end of his life and told him: „Here,
nobody could take the permission to enter inside, because this entrance is made only for
you, and now I’m going to close it“
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How can we understand this fictional text? We can insist on our real situation as it did
Josef K. He insists on reality in which he lives and the story is important for him as a
story that can help him to explain his life situation in front of the curt. The priest didn’t
want to make a relation between the text and the reality, he insists on the immanent
interpretation, and he left open all the questions. The differences of the positions depend
of two goals: the first is the importance of what the story means and the second is the
importance of existing the story equally as the cathedral, everything is in the text, and it is
unchangeable. It looks very naive to read the parable only to understand somebody’s
experience, but at the same time we ask ourselves: why do we read if we haven’t the
responses of the questions of our life problems. Sometimes we read to accept something
new about the world. But, it is sure, that if someone doesn’t want to say something, he
doesn’t try to narrate the story/!
We have to make a frame of the context in which we understand the fiction. The
metaphysical reality corresponded with the physical reality. There are different aspects of
interpretation. Maybe the man didn’t do everything to pass the door, if at the end of his
life, the doorkeeper use the statement that the entrance is made for him. Maybe the nature
of the law is usually deceptive, or we can ask ourselves are there any objective type of
interpretation of the meaning?
First of all, we have to define the context in which we will make our interpretation,
than we will sow another context and another, and so on. That is the problem of objective
context or the commentary about every speech act, especially about the story. The
problem of commentary or the generally crisis of the context or interpretation is in
relation with the problem of the sense of the text. The creating and reading is in relation
with the fact that the sense could not escape from the tradition. The tradition of contexts,
commentary and concepts are not definitely determinate. Because of that, we speak about
the interpretation of the tradition that is evaluated in one historical moment. It seems that
the crises of commentary are the crisis of tradition. The sense of the text is in connection
with the critical analyzing of the tradition in which it is appeared; or rather tradition is the
context in which we are looking for the context.
I decide to make a comparison between the situation of the world in which I spend
my life and the other worlds. It is sure that my world is very close to some worlds on the
margin, or rather the worlds on the borders, like as it is the world of the people in
Mexico, Philippines or Guatemala. I share the destiny of hundreds of others belonging to
3
other nations that fall in to the Forth World countries insisting on a cultural and national
identity. Those countries, as Richard Griggs said, struggle to acquire or sustain
sovereignty or recognition of their national Gestalt. I live in Macedonia, the country on
the border with European community represented by Greece, on the territory that is in
Europe and with a very specific signification and representation which is inscribed in the
name of the country: Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
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What does it means for me? That means that my collective identity is realized and
represented by the perspective situated in the past, not yet in my present. It also means
that my situation is in the way of transition from the past to the present. I spend my life
living on the border and asking for passport that takes me to the reality of the present.
The image of Macedonians can be described by deleting the memory of the communist
past life and through a narrative that could be narrated as myth instead of a history. The
interpretation of the parable can be understand as an effort for making the reconstruction
of the moral dimension of the law through which this world accepted the norms that open
different possibilities of living.
From my point of view traveling is epitomized as ‘transition’, ‘although ‘the term
‘transition’ is pitifully misleading and empty concept in itself; yet it is pragmatically and
is possible to be used for post-socialist and post-colonial transition (they have much in
common). Peculiarly enough, the term never says towards what it is meant to be the
transition. Surely, it must be globalization of the Western/Northern pattern of postmodern
neo-liberal capitalism”, as concluded R.Ivekovic (2001, 1).
If we start to walk on the road of transition, the passport could be a symbol of
purgatorial walk to the Paradise through which we have to clean from the sins that are left
in our mind from the period of communism.
The spirit of the nation becomes sovereign by its state, and the state is the world that
is made by the spirit of the nation. By deleting the state or putting it in to the past, we are
forced to delete the culture, the language, and the history. We have only a myth and
virtual life at the present as a former people from a former country.
The concept corresponding with the situation of the reality of my country is
postcolonial concept, which is useful because it “seize the given apparatus by reversing it
and displacing it” (C.G.Spivak, 1990, 228). By using the catachrestic speech of the theory
or analyses, that accounting the margins, I can deny the simple transplantation of the
given concepts or simple auto referential knowledge.
From the other side, I need to make a revision of the categories and conceptual tools.
Because of that, the intention of my speech is not the concept of ethnicization, through
which I have to speak, “because it is at work each time when we accept and utilize the
categories which have resulted from a conflict-to explain that conflict”. (R.Ivecovic,
2001, 7)
4
The tautology points out that our discourse based on a conflict has to postulate a
completely closed narrative. Because of that, I have to spike through the accepted, but
very conflict concepts to come to myself and to create the language of my reality. By that
way I can create the narrative that could be acceptable for the others and which could be
fluent in the process of understanding and inter-subjective dialogue.
Colonialism and later nationalism, imagined the ‘discovered territories they proposed
to civilize as ‘empty territories’, or as ‘nobody‘s land’. Territories, geography, countries,
borders have to be virtually created ex nihilo. In North and in Latin America the nations
are created without the local population or in disregard of it, underscored by an elitist
dream about an imported population, about a ready made people coming from Europe
and already in itself a political subject, citizens.
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The post-colonial discourse, according to Homi Bhabba, intervened when the people
from the local places or margins have a specific description in the discourse of modernity
and in the normal appropriation of the truth. They are usually unequal, different; they
haven’t a normal process of development. Instead of nation, state or history, they have a
transitive or rather virtual situation of legitimization. (Homi Bhabba. (1997, 211)
According to the contemporary believing, I belong to the territory that has to forget
its communist past life (although it is a socialist, but because the country was leading by
the communist party on the head, we can accept that our past is communist history of
living). After that period, it has to be create as a national state, which could be able to
legitimated the territory between the „others“ (nationalities) and to produce the document
of identification that will be legal and acceptable for all.
How can I explain the reality of my life?
Every sphere of the reality is a social construction and the discourse for the reality has
political consequences. The language doesn’t correspond with the reality in a close, pure
and innocent relation. It usually depends of the subject that uses it with aim to represent
the structure of the culture. According to the main stream in the sciences of humanities, I
can conclude that the western cultures are the centre of the concepts; they ‘promote’ the
discourse for the reality as a successful culture.
The concepts through which they can decide or have the power to create their
perspective of the life - of the others, uncivilized or empty people - are usually restricted
by their central point of view!? If we try to speak about the differences between reality of
a successful culture and social constructivism, then we have to ask further more, are there
any self-critical tendency in the western tradition of rationality, how do they become so
successful, or to whom the western cultures debits its success?
2. The useful concepts of analyzing
5
From one side, Benjamin explained the task of the translator. He was analyzing the
translation as a process of going close to the unity, or to the God. On the other side, we
have the other concept of Derrida who points out that with his presence; the process of
the translation deletes the differance between the forgery and the original, or between the
original and the translation. According to our starting discussion about the priest and
Josef K. and according to Derrida, it looks like that there is nothing out of the text.
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G.C Spivak in her preface of Derrida’s Of Grammatology points out to the process of
deconstruction. The reader has to go out of the directions that are given by Derrida as a
subject who control the process of reading. (1976:1xxxvii). Because of that, the concepts
that are close to my goal of explanation activated the ‘catachrestic’ fluctuation and leaded
to the theory of post-colonialism. If the deconstruction is against the essentialism and
representation, than feminism or postcolonial critic, subaltern critic couldn’t stay only on
the basis of deconstructivism, and it has to go back to the representation of the identity or
to the self-representation.
Leaving the theory of deconstruction, we have to start our work in the world of our
life. Post-colonial critic has to develop the intelligence of a local mind. The discourse of
representation has to goes over the derivative or auto referential discourse; it has to
negotiate and to use the modern or the post-modern discourse without analyzing and
deconstructing the discourse through a ‘game’. (Homi Bhabba; 1983:33) The concepts of
analyzing don’t have to stay inside; they have to go outside and to become useful.
At the end, Derrida was speaking about his asking for the line of his life, for the
language of his life, he was speaking about the sketch of the book that he could write in
the future, using the old and the new, archaic or the new language. He is speaking about
his constantly remembering and about his looking for his own form, it couldn’t be only
the story, but the story of his culture, of the language, the families and over all, the story
of Algerian. Derrida is speaking about the positive ethic of identification.
To speak about one’s cultural inheritance means to speak about many concrete forms
that are developed from the individuals with generations. (Clifford Geertz, 1994:395)
Cultural inheritance or the filings of belonging to some culture or history is an origin of
emotional safety and give us a self-force to do something. In the systems of repressive
regimes the main goal usually corresponds with the destruction of the cultural
inheritance.
Because the concept of the border along with the concept of the nation and the state is
too global, and because there are too many particularities, it looks better to speak about
the concept of primordial loyalty. By that way, we can catch the local worlds developed
in different part of the world. It is a close connection between the subject and the social
existence that is his own; in it we can include the language, religion and history. It is
6
important and useful for analyzing, according to Geertz, to include the perspective of the
actor, not of the indifferent spectator.
Because of that, I have to accept first of all the position of a child, because from its
position there are no questions about the woman that everybody called his mother,
because for him she is really his object of projection (J. Lacan) and his mammy. It simply
believes and it doesn’t ask. Because of that, my starting positions include the concept of
believing instead of suspicion and asking, or skepticism. Believing is constituted before
the knowledge, and the suspicion comes after that, with the knowledge. I want to say that
I believe in my history, country and its culture and after that I start to speak about the
suspicions in my collective identity
3. The history of passports
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The history of passports points out to some aspects that I want to explain. In her essay
on ‘Passports’, Susan Buck-Morrs presents archaeology of the passport which makes it
bearer of an object of intolerance, because the function of the passport always been to
restrict and confine. The Middle Age and the plague produced the ‘pest pass’, as ‘a
means of preventing entry into the community of diseased persons during epidemics of
the plague’, and ‘established an ideology of aliens as a dangerous source of
contamination’. At that time, passports were used as a means of controlling military
desertion. And after World War I, the passport would develop the ‘Pest pass’ idea on a
global ideological plane; the passport was supposed to prevent entry or intrusion of the
ideas of communism and anarchism into Western countries. Later, in the countries of the
now former Eastern Block, the passport prevented the exit. “By creating a place of
passport control and practice of passing through it’, according to Buck-Morrs, ‘it gave the
appearance that state boundaries were substantive, that they really existed, that a
particular state apparatus ‘owned’ a part of the world, in the same way that a private
citizen owned his home, a capitalist his business, a farmer his field, a person his or her
own body-except that the state owned all of this first’. (Sarkanjac, 2000, 47)
If the privileged vocabulary of the theoretical subject is legitimated as an objective,
scientific and totalitarian, no one, lesser the policeman who is representative of the Law
can think about someone who is staying long time in front of the Consulate of the
Netherlands and wait for visa applying. He has recommendations from his government
and its administration that he has to apply ‘their law ‘for the Macedonians. His job is to
make the control; his power is to select the pure from the others, and to show the way to
the Purgatory. The power of the policeman is manifested through his right to control the
people on the way of their entrance in the world of paradise, or the world of European
Community, or, I can say, the First World.
There are many different answers for that case. To solve the problem between the
central and the local worlds, Donna Harway proposes the relations between the local and
7
critical possibilities of thought; she proposes the net of relations between different
political or epistemological positions. (1991). Accepting the logic of pragmatism or
dialog in the community of different people seems to be a simple discourse against the
Power. But speaking through the discourse of post modernity that is proscribed through
the CENTER, it looks like that we have to accept the differences without giving
something new which could be useful instead of traditional discourse of the science of
universal thought. It is not important for the scientist from the marginal academic
community only to analyze through simple acceptation of the concept of “orientalism”
from E.Said or through the postcolonial discourse instead of traditional concepts of
universal truth, rationality, realism, objectivity. The most important for him becomes his
reality of identification.
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The power of western concepts or its epistemology couldn’t make my passport free
from all that controls in front of the door of the Consulates of European Community. I
can accept the theoretical concepts for making the narrative if they are only the
instruments for negotiation with the subaltern, or if they aren’t the instruments for
epistemological violence and stigmatization of my identity represented by the European
Law. According to master-narratives, Macedonians have a narrative that is only a myth,
not a scientific proof, they have no state, no name of the state, and they live in the
territory that has to be named from outside, or rather by the Centre.
I think that I could hear many excellent people with great souls that are speaking for
me, but they don’t have the experience of the reality about which they are trying to speak.
I’m accepting the pluriversum instead of universe, but in my practical life, I haven’t
any answer for it, it is defined in the space of the past time. Instead of all, identities are
constructed not only in relation to unique territories, but also in the multicultural
intersection of objects, messages and people coming from divergent directions. Starting
with that meaning, I’m involving the concept of traveling.
The concept of traveling started with the explanations of Deles and Gattary at the
early eighties, but it was transformed to a concept of international communication,
globalization or rather homologization of the hegemonic models of the thoughts. There is
no political activity; everything became some kind of voyageristic nomadism closed to
technology. To be someone, who can accept the position of nomad, you have to be at first
subject, rather then nobody or everybody. It means that the traveler/nomad has to have a
root or its origin, its history, language and identification, and after that he has to decide to
be everyone. Nomadism means to have the root and than to throw it away. Because of
that, the symbol of passport points out to some concepts that is traditionally active in
everyday life: identity, crossing the borders of national or ethnical identity, opening the
new doors of the world and it usually means living close to the people.
8
As the document of identification, at the same time national and individual, the
passport is made to locate the origin of the traveler. It enables the passage from one
country to another, but also stamps people by their place of birth and the time that
changing them. The passport as synthesis of entrapment serves as a metaphor to man or
woman of multicultural age, and amongst them to the artists for whom their place is not
within any particular culture, but in the interstices between them, in transit.
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This narrative about different uses of the passport during the history leads my
discussion to the parable that was given at the beginning of my discussion. Using the
parable we can make a comparison and through the interpretation of the story we can
point out to some moral dilemmas: If the doorkeeper cheat the peasant, than the priest has
a right because he explain that there isn’t any contradictions between the statement that
‘now ‘the peasant couldn’t enter through the door and the statement that ‘the door is
prescribed for him’. The text is unchangeable, and it is very sad, explains the priest. Josef
K. insisted on all contradictions between the different interpretations of the words of the
doorkeeper. But, at the end, the priest argued his story with these words:”There is no
need to count everything as a truth, but as a necessity”. The last sentence of Josef K is: ‘It
is so sad explanation, because it means that the world is based on lies.’”
Literature:
Homi Bhabba. (1983) “The Other Question-the Stereotype and Colonial
Discourse’, Screen 24(6): 18-36.
Homi Bhabba (1990). Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge.
Jacques Derrida (1978). Writing and Difference. London: Routledge and Keegan
Paul.
Clifford Geertz. (1994) ’Angestammte Loyälitaten, bestehende Einheiten’,
Mercur 48 (5): 392-403.
Richard Gregg (1971). The power of Nonviolence. New York: Shocken Books.
Donna Haraway (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of
Nature. London: Free Association Book.
Edward Said (1978). Orientalism.London.Routledge and Keegan Paul.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (1976). ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida,
Of Grammatology.Baltimore: Johan Hopkins University Press.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (1996) ’Poststructuralism, Marginality,
Postcoloniality and value, pp.219-44 in Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (eds.)
Literary theory today. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rada Ivekovic. (1998). ‘Nation and Identity in Post-Socialist Transition”, Die
Erweiterung Europas, Österrechische Geselleshaft fűr Mitteleuropäshe Studien,
HUMANIORA, Fundacja dla humanistyki, Wien-Poznen , pp. 229-241.
Rada Ivekovic. (2001) ‘Gender and borders and boundaries. European integration
and the ethnicization of the Balkans’, Women and Gender relations: Eastern and
Southern boundaries (lecturing at the European University of Florence).
9
Nigel Rapport. (1998). “Movement and Identity’, Traditions in Movement, ASCA
Yearbook, Ed. By Thomas Elsaesser, Burcht Pranger, Beate Roessler, Hent de Vrais,
Willem Weststejn.
Branislav Srakanjac, Makedonskiot katahrezis, Skopje, 2001.
Branislav Srakanjac, STATE- IRWIN, Skopje, 2000.
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10
Memory under Siege:
Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze
The history of the Balkans may well be confusing, yet there is something which has risen from
the South . . . What I mean is that there exists a Mediterranean culture. Greece is the Balkans,
but the Mediterranean as well, and as much (sic) inherits from both of these . . . which the
Italians, the Spanish, the French also inherit . . . And in this or that way, whether or not
because our blood mingled with theirs, it circulates as a cultural memory . . .
Theo Angelopoulos (“Rigas Feraios’ Map” 17)
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I
Je me souviens—I remember—the motto deputy minister of Crown Lands Eugène- Étienne Taché had
carved into the façade of the parliament building in Québec City in 1883, and which appears on the
province’s coat of arms and, since 1978, on Québec license plates, is emblematic of the importance and
indeterminacy of cultural memory. At once a personal and a collective declaration, je me souviens
epitomizes the foundational role memory plays in the creation of collectivities or, in Benedict Anderson’s
words, in the formation of imagined communities. A marker of Québécois identity, remembering operates
as a point of suture signifying how cultural and political forces interpellate identity. Indeed, as an
institutionalized act, je me souviens functions as an imperative that grants greater transparency to the
Althusserian process of interpellation. Remembering, in Québec’s case, is posited as a condition of
citizenship, a form of participatory action: Je me souviens, therefore I belong. One would expect, then, this
imperative to remember to have a concrete referent, a particular historical moment. Ironically, however,
remembering in this instance does not activate an agreed-upon memory. There is no record of what Taché
had in mind, nor did René Leveque, the premier of Québec who changed the provincial motto La Belle
Province to Je me souviens in 1978, ever explained what specific memory he wanted his Partis Québécois
to promote. Nor is it clear who the subject of je is. It could be every citizen of Québec: francophone,
anglophone, or allophone; perhaps even Québec-born or diasporic subjects and First Nations people in
Québec—“perhaps” because the sovereignty politics in this Canadian province, especially as espoused by
some of its core members, would not include easily immigrants or Aboriginals in this collective
articulation.
There is, as a result, no shortage of theories as to what Québécois citizens are to remember. Jacques
Rouillard, for example, writes that
The original meaning of Quebec’s motto that is found in the memorial of the Parliament is a good
example of the changing and lost memory of national collectivities. . . . The motto is a construction
of memory that reflects the bourgeois values of the French-Canadians at the end of the nineteenth
century. It demands that we remember a past that affirms the French origins of Quebec, while also
operating as a gesture of gratitude toward the British character of Quebec’s institutions that
facilitated the advent of democracy, a certain political autonomy for Quebec, and the growth of
French Canada. Ultimately, the motto provides a way of distinguishing Quebec from the Other
(Great Britain, English Canada), while at the same time acknowledging gratitude for his liberality.
(144)1
This is a plausible, indeed credible, interpretation of what Québecers are to remember, but a recent
documentary film, A License to Remember: Je me souviens, makes it abundantly clear that there is no
concensus either in terms of who the subject of je is or what is to be remembered. Until I searched for
confirmation, my own assumption had been that je me souviens referred to the 1759 battle on the Plains of
Abraham, General Wolfe’s victory over the French. This must be, at least for some, one of the possible
events to remember, but for the Mohawks of the Kanesatake reserve je me souviens makes a travesty of
their own loss of sovereignty,2 while for a black speaker in the film the phrase is a reminder that Québec,
too, practiced slavery.3 Yet another man interviewed offers a cynical explanation: "They want us to
1
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remember what they want us to remember—that Indians are bad, the English are bad and that we won't be
able to speak French unless we separate."
This case of remembering exemplifies that, even when institutionalized, cultural memory is a fluid
archive at best, persistent yet variable, an archive that has a cumulative structure. Not only must the history
it echoes be heard in the plural, but who remembers and why remembering is an imperative must also be
seen as the result of complex discursive forces. While an attempt to resolve the contradictions of what is
being remembered would inevitably end in homogenizing, and therefore further mystifying, the past, the
very difficulty of determining what memory entails is also what reveals memory’s capacity for mythmaking, precisely what constitutes cultural memory. Myth-making in this context is not a reference to a
narrative of origins, but to the processes and practices that make up the social imaginary. Myth here is to be
understood in the terms in which Stathis Gourgouris reads Hans Blumenberg’s investigation of myth in the
modern age, namely, as “present-time logic, as history’s scientia in the strict sense: a mode of knowledge
that commands a generative domain of social symbolic forms autonomous from the generative logic of
science or reason . . . a mode of knowledge that counters the ‘absolutism of reality.” Understanding
mythical thinking this way, Gourgouris argues, is “tantamount to the work of sublimation: the intervention
into and appropriation of reality by society’s psychic forces, by means of its radical imagination”
(Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? 107). It is this relationship of cultural memory and myth-making, how
memory and history are interrelated in ways that may often cancel each other out, that I intend to focus on
here.4 Be it reliable or unreliable, “the raw material of history” (Le Goff xi) or not, because memory
signifies a come-back to a time and place that cannot guarantee a re-encounter with the original events, it is
analogous to the trope of the return, one of the most important tropes through which diasporic subjectivity
is performed. What happens, then, when different kinds of a diasporic subject’s memory—personal,
familial, collective—and history become imbricated in each other in ways that both reinforce and challenge
the ideological make-up of the social imaginary?
II
Theo Angelopoulos’ 1994 Ulysses’ Gaze, a 176' film, which won many international prizes, addresses
precisely this question. Through the aesthetic tropes and complex ideological vision that have come to be
the trademarks of Angelopoulos’ cinematography, Ulysses’ Gaze dramatizes in poignant ways the dynamic
of memory and history, how they clash but also how they feed each other.5 It traces the return journey of a
nameless Greek American filmmaker—listed in the film’s credits as A., and played by Harvey Keitel—to
Greece, a journey that soon becomes an odyssey through the war-torn Balkans in the early 1990s. Flooded
with memories—some from his own past, others from the repository of the region’s cultural memories—A.
traverses the Balkans to track down three undeveloped reels of film made by the historical brothers
Yannakis and Milton Manakis early in the twentieth century. These two brothers are considered to be the
Lumière brothers in the Balkans, the first to document the region in photographs and film. Why does A.
undertake this journey through a territory that is being ravaged by violence, at a time when one’s neighbors
and relatives turn into one’s worst enemies? As I hope to show, what A. experiences and re-lives on this
journey offers an anatomy of the atavistic power and discursive structure of, as well as the role of archives
in, cultural memory.
As A. admits early in Ulysses’ Gaze, his research for the documentary about the Manakis brothers
the Film Archives in Athens has commissioned him to make is simply a “pretext” for what he calls a
“personal” mission. Still, as he journeys through the troubled Balkans, the personal and the collective
become inextricably related. Stating that the Manakis’ undeveloped films represent for him “a lost
innocence” about “the new era, the new century” they “attempted to record,” A. identifies their “first
glance” with his “own first glance, lost long ago.” While the “first glance” evidently evokes the notion of
origins, because A. speaks at once as a diasporic subject and as a filmmaker, this glance signifies both the
“self-regard” diasporic subjects tend to practice6 and the artistic gaze of the filmmaker.7 Although related,
these two gazes are not the same; their identification in the character of A. points to the process of
mediation that informs any attempt at accessing a collective past. Even though he never clarifies what
precise value he attributes to this “first glance,” it is apparent that it holds for him the hope that the
resuscitation of cultural memories need not result in the kind of violence he witnesses as he travels through
the Balkans. What drives A.’s quest, then, is not only his diasporic background and artistic interests as
filmmaker, but also his belief that a re-encounter with the first glance at the region may disclose a gaze that
could shake up the “eternal” values and meaning memorialized in national master narratives. No matter
their conflicting nature, the memories held by that first gaze may reveal ways of negotiating national
mythologies at odds with each other. How cultural memory is recorded, interpreted, and practiced has the
2
potential to alter the present state of affairs, and hence the course of history. Thus the Bosnian War may not
be the immediate focus in Ulysses’ Gaze, but neither is it simply there as the gratuitous backdrop of A.’s
journey.
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[I]t is impossible to have peace and normality not because the Balkan peoples could not in
principle have much better relations with one another, but because the interests at stake in the are
too great to permit such a development. The way I see it, the roots of the problem go way back in
time and all the various conflicts were encouraged, at one time or another. There is a joke I often
tell which I heard on my first trip. Before the war a foreign journalist went to Bosnia and was
walking about in a town which had a mixed population—i.e. Muslims, Serbs and Croats—and at
some point he went where we all go. There was a large public urinal in the centre of the square
and he headed towards it, but just as he reached it someone passed him and made the sign of the
cross. He stood surprised for a moment, then someone else went by, crossing himself in the
Catholic manner but with the same degree of respect before the urinal—and then a Muslim passed,
making the analogous Muslim gesture. The journalist asked someone and was told that the in the
12th century there used to be an Orthodox church on this spot. In the 14th century it became a
mosque and when the Austro-Hungarians arrived it became a Catholic church. Tito, to erase all
that, demolished it and built a public urinal. Angelopoulos (“Rigas” 17)
This joke Angelopoulos tells, by way of accounting for the historical and cultural contexts of Ulysses’
Gaze, is akin to the symbolic economy of memory in Québec, but also shows that cultural memory in
Bosnia has a different structure. Whereas holding on cultural memory in Québec is an officially sanctioned
imperative, and the ambivalence of what is to be remembered serves well the hybrid make-up and separatist
politics of the province, remembering the past in Yugoslavia is curtailed by a contrary imperative, namely,
a state-sanctioned policy to forget the cultural particularities of the ethnic communities in the region. The
conversion of a sacred space located in the middle of the public square to a urinal—the kind of image we
could find in an Emil Kusturica film—suggests a dialectic relationship between cultural memory and the
state, one translated in this case into a tension between the sacred and the profane. A profane site / sight, the
urinal paradoxically evokes religious veneration, thus canceling out the attempt of Tito’s political machine
to evacuate cultural memory. A palimpsestic signifier, the urinal has a secular function: it stands for the
interference of the state apparatus, and operates as a public, albeit ironic, monument to the recalcitrance of
different kinds of cultural memory. Thus, contrary to the Quebeckers who, though they are constantly
reminded to remember, do not know what they are expected to commit to memory, the ethnically and
religiously diverse Bosnians memorialize the sacredness of the location, an act that resists the state’s
indictment against cultural memory.
Here cultural memory does not need public exhortations, like je me souviens, to survive; in
contrast, despite the former Yugoslavian state’s thwarted attempt to erase it, cultural remembering persists,
and does so in a fashion that stresses the hybridity embedded in cultural memory. While cultural memory is
often monumentalized, in Bosnia it is at once suppressed and in circulation. This double mode of cultural
memory reinforces not only the ineradicable presence of what is remembered, but also the historical and
political vagaries that contribute to cultural memory’s palimpsestic and cumulative structure. Making the
Manakis’ undeveloped reels the object of his destination, A. intuits that their practice as photographers and
filmmakers, together with the instability of their national affiliations, had captured cultural memory in a
manner that makes a mockery of the atavism of national origins and its attendant savagery he witnesses as
he traverses the Balkan region. As A. explains his interest in the Manakis brothers’ work, “they weren’t
concerned with politics, racial questions, friends or enemies. They were interested in people.”8
But this kind of politically unmarked cultural memory is not what A. is confronted with once he
sets out on his odyssey, a journey that does not mimic the odyssean paradigm faithfully. A. may travel
through a foggy landscape echoing the Cimmerian land shrouded in mist and darkness in the Odyssey, and
symbolically descend to the underworld of Greek mythology, led by a female Charon-like figure, as he
travels on the Danube and its maze of tributaries, but his diasporic condition and the object and direction of
his travels reconstitute the trope of the return in significant ways. It is not toward the conventional notion of
home or personal past that A. travels; instead, in Ulysses’ Gaze home operates as a discursive site. It is
diaspora as a condition of dissemination and documentary film as a record of cultural memory that shape
3
A.’s journey. That the “first gaze” he is after is that of two brothers’ whose life trajectories embody the
juggling of different cultural identities and continuous movement within the Balkans recasts diaspora as a
site not of arrival, but of departure, a site of “new” origins. Not only does this suspend the inherited
emphasis on diasporic roots, but posits the routes of diasporic subjects as fluid sites generating a sense of
origins that do not always coincide with the homeland.9
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Ulysses’ Gaze opens with two cinematic quotations that suggest that art, specifically film, because of the
questions it raises about the politics of representation, seems to hold some of the answers that might arise
when nation states and their borders are viewed through diasporic eyes, when subject positions and
belonging are mediated by interpretations of cultural memory. The first quotation is oral, and situates A. as
a filmmaker whose films are controversial. It is in the voice of Marcello Mastroianni, playing the role of
the missing politician in Angelopoulos’ 1991 The Suspended Step of the Stork presented in Ulysses’ Gaze
as A.’s own film. Mastroianni’s words, “Lost your way again . . . How many borders must we cross to
reach home?”, announce at once A.’s preoccupations as filmmaker and the central theme of Ulysses’ Gaze.
The scene when this film is played marks A.’s return to Florina, a town in the northern Greek province of
Macedonia—not Athens or his birthplace, as many of the film’s reviewers and critics mistakenly claim.10
Ostensibly, what brings A. back to Florina after an absence of twenty-five years is an invitation by the Film
Archive in Athens to attend the showing of one of his films, a film the local religious authorities have
declared to be blasphemous. The religious community is holding a procession through the streets of the
town, bearing candles and chanting, under the watchful eyes of the police. When A. enters the scene, he
and his hosts find themselves under siege; they keep retracing their steps as they come face to face, every
time they turn a corner, with the protesting crowd. By beginning Ulysses’ Gaze with this scene, including a
reference to a film that directly questions national identity and the borders of nation states, Angelopoulos
problematizes the trope of the return, namely, the assumption that the pull the home country exerts on its
diasporic subjects is a manifestation of a filiative bond that remains intact. A.’s rejection by the official
church’s status quo is a direct allusion to similar problems Angelopoulos encountered when shooting The
Suspended Step of the Stork in Florina, but, beyond that, it suggests that A.’s return is motivated by the
affiliative network of relations he perceives between himself, in particular his work, and that of the
Manakis brothers’.
This opening scene in Florina, then, serves as a preamble to the journey he is about to embark on.
Florina is the place where A.’s family was forced to relocate from Constanza after WW II when the
Communist regime in Romania turned against the bourgeoisie. Significantly, the narrative of Ulysses’ Gaze
obfuscates the origins of A.’s family; as A.’s father says, in the flashback sequence that dramatizes the
family memories flooding A.’s mind,11 they have been in the diaspora for “generations.” Their origin is an
“imagined” nation that survives through language and cultural practices. Indeed, assuming A.’s family had
settled in what is now Romania at the time of the Ottoman Empire, there was no Greek state as such in that
period. Greece, as Stathis Gourgouris puts it, was truly a “dream nation” (1996) at the time, a nation that
was to be borne, in part, as a result of the financial and political endeavors of Greeks who belonged to the
long-established “victim” and “trade” diasporas in Europe and the Black Sea region (Hassiotis ). In
keeping with the region’s history, the Greek homeland in Ulysses’ Gaze figures as a dispersed space, a
space mimicking the dispersion integral to the technology of diaspora.
By confounding the origins the trope of the return points to, Angelopoulos deconstructs the
singularity traditionally attributed to the origins of diaspora. Ulysses’ Gaze suggests that home and nation
are not always aligned, that they are, in fact, often at odds with each other. Showing that the Balkans has
always been a region where people of different ethnic backgrounds moved and settled in the midst of other
ethnic groups, Ulysses’ Gaze exposes the “insanity” of trying to establish new national borders against the
fluidity of diasporic movements and memory. As Mastroianni’s voice puts it, “We crossed the border, but
we’re still here.” Angelopoulos thus demonstrates that a diasporic subject’s return to the homeland does not
necessarily involve a reentry into an unambiguously delineated space, or into a history that can appease the
diasporic subject’s sense of loss or need for belonging. When A.’s family is forced to relocate in 1950,
neither A. nor anyone else answers the question posed by one of the family members, “Are you glad to be
going to Greece?” Heard as a rhetorical question by all present, it belies the nostalgia supposedly
characterizing diasporic subjects. Instead of seeing their relocation to Greece as a homecoming, A.’s family
laments their loss of the only home they have known—a home in the diaspora, diaspora as home—and
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grieve for the fact that Constanza will be evacuated of its diverse population that includes, among others,
Greeks and Armenians.
But for the exterior of the family’s now abandoned and dilapidated house in Florina, there are no
visual mementos in Greece for A.. When he takes a woman walking past him for a woman he had been in
love with, the line he addresses to this specter from his past, “I wish I could tell you I returned, but
something is holding me back,” further implies that Florina is not the destination of his journey. As he
keeps repeating, the show of his film and his personal connection with Florina only serve as a “pretext” for
his return. It is later in Ulysses’ Gaze that A., on a train that takes him from Monastiri, through Skopje, to
Bucharest, reveals what has motivated his return. He has come back as a filmmaker in the hope of
overcoming the artistic and personal crisis he has been going through after an experience he had two years
earlier on the island of Delos. Looking for appropriate locations to shoot a film, he witnessed an “ancient
olive tree toppling over,” and a bust of Apollo emerging from that rip in the earth. But when he repeatedly
employed a Polaroid camera to photograph the scene, he was shocked to discover that it “hadn’t registered
a thing.” The photographs were “black negative pictures . . . as if my glance wasn’t working, same empty
squares, black holes.” It is after this “disturb[ing]” experience that he accepts the Film Archive’s proposal
to direct a documentary on the Manakis brothers. Discovering that the Manakis had left “three reels,
perhaps a whole film,” undeveloped, something “not mentioned by any film historian,” he develops an
obsession with locating and seeing that “first glance, a lost glance.” Both the failure of his Polaroid and the
Manakis’ lost first gaze are symptomatic of A.’s own condition: his “own first lost gaze.” Hence his return
as a diasporic artist, a return to a hybrid and fluid destination: a home place that is not-a-home in a region
where national borders are being redrawn in blood, and three reels, whose old chemical formula defies
modern technology, that keep changing hands. Through its direct engagement with the hybridity of cultural
memory, and its references to the instability of national borders in the Balkans at the time, Ulysses’ Gaze
materializes the volatility of the contents of cultural memory. Be it personal and collective, or national and
intranational, cultural memory simultaneously contains and confounds national origins, precisely what the
Manakis brothers’ lives and work exemplify.
V
Yannakis and Milton Manakis enter Ulysses’ Gaze through the second cinematic quotation in the
film, immediately after the sequence in Florina, a quotation whose visuality and genealogy resurrect the
past. Black and white, and in the jerky style of the early period of silent films, this opening footage of
peasant old and young women weaving is from the Manakis brothers’ film, The Weavers (I Ifantries), their
first, two-minute-long documentary that features their 114-year-old grandmother, Despina.12 A.’s voiceover helps situate the documentary: “Weavers in Avthela, a Greek village, 1905. The first film made by
brothers Milton and Yannakis Manakis. The first film ever made in Greece and the Balkans. But is this a
fact? Is it the first film? The first gaze?” Though there is some uncertainty about various aspects of the
large archive of photographs, films, and postcards that Milton Manakis bequeathed to the Yugoslavian
government between 1955 and 1964, there seems to be no doubt that The Weavers is indeed the first film
ever made in the Balkans.13 A.’s question is not so much meant to raise doubts about this documentary’s
authenticity; rather, asked at a time when he is facing a crisis as a filmmaker and when national sensibilities
and ethnic cleansing are tearing Yugoslavia apart, his question announces at once a concern with and a
distrust for origins, specifically the ambivalence that characterizes any project aimed at re-installing
foundational myths of nation formation. Above all, his question suggests that the “personal” journey he is
on is that of a filmmaker. Art, more specifically documentary film, precisely because of the questions it
raises about the politics of representation, seems to hold the answers that might exist about how origins
survive in cultural memory. This is the reason why his personal quest is soon translated into a transpersonal
journey. Not only does the way in which he relives his past relationships become enmeshed with the
women he encounters on his journey (all played by the same actress, Maia Morgenstern), but he takes on
the persona of Yannakis Manakis when he re-enacts the political episode that resulted in Yannakis’ exile in
Plovdin, Bulgaria.14
A few words at this point about the lives of Yannakis (1878-1954) and Milton (1882-1964)
Manakis15 are necessary in order to understand the historical importance of their oeuvre and its relevance to
Ulysses’ Gaze. Not only did their 12,500 photographs, about 70 films, and large number of postcards
documented the peasant and urban life of an area that included what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Romania,
Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and FYROM, as well as Istanbul, but they recorded turning points in the Balkan
region’s political history. Their lives overlapped with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and so they
became inadvertent spectators of the various insurgent movements and wars, as well as the intensive
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Bulgarian and Romanian propaganda movements,16 in the Balkans at a time when national borders and
ethnic and national identities were being reconfigured. The subjects they documented ranged from folkloric
events, weddings, and local fairs to official appearances of Romanian and Greek kings and crown princes
and the riots of prisoners and warriors involved in the Greek Macedonian insurgency movement; from key
figures of the Greek and Bulgarian revolutions against the Turks to Mehmet V’s arrival as the last Sultan of
the Ottoman Empire in Thessaloniki, where he died, to the Neo-Turks of Kemal Ataturk’s movement and,
later, Tito. Their film that documented the discovery of the body of Metropolitan Emilianos of Grevena,
assassinated by the Neo-Turks, and his funeral (1911) was distributed and shown widely in Europe, as well
as among the diasporic Greeks in the United States.
Obviously, it is the historical value of the Manakis’ photo and film archive that lies behind A.’s—
and Angelopoulos’—interest in the two brothers, but their life trajectories, embodying as they do the
political exigencies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, bolster the significance, as well as
the ambivalence, characterizing their work as an act of witnessing. Greek Vlachs, born in Avthella, a
mountainous village in the prefecture of Grevena in Macedonia, Greece, they were sponsored by
educational grants provided by the Romanian government to attend Romanian Lyceums. Despite the
turmoil in that period, Milton remained politically neutral throughout his life: he got along as much with his
fellow Greek Vlachs as with the Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Romanians, Germans and Slavic
Macedonians, and belonged to such associations as the Red Cross, the Jewish Humanistic Brotherhood, the
French-Serbian League, and the Yugoslavian Union. The older brother’s life path, however, does not
reflect, what we might call, Milton’s cosmopolitanism. Trained as an arts teacher in Romanian schools,
Yannakis was susceptible to Romanian propaganda—perhaps because of the financial benefits it afforded
him. He thus found himself embroiled in various compromising roles, especially after he got on the payroll
of the Romanian educational system and began participating more directly in the propaganda endeavors of
Romanian consuls and school superintendents in the years 1904-06.17 Though it was Yannakis who, upon
seeing their first movie camera in Bucharest in 1905, did not rest until he acquired one, it was Milton who
is credited as the “creator” of most of the photographs and films comprising the brothers’ archive.18
Following the 1921 fire that destroyed their movie theatre (the first one) in Monastiri, the two brothers
declared bankruptcy. While Milton kept their photo studio in Monastiri operating until 1961, though he
stopped making films in 1927, Yannakis, who remained a Greek citizen his entire life, returned to Greece
in 1939 where he taught in the Romanian School of Commerce in Thessaloniki. It is their house, turned
into a museum after Milton’s death, which A. goes to visit in Monastiri.
Their undeveloped reels that are sent from one city to another, together with the adaptation of their
lives and work, in Ulysses’ Gaze helps establish the genealogy of the Bosnian War, but also calls attention
to how history repeats itself, one of the ways in which cultural memory is manifested. If the Manakis’
visual archive documents the complex and traumatic record of the Balkan past, it also operates as an
anterior narrative in relation to the violence in the present, thus having a proleptic function. As a record of
cultural memory, their archive, to evoke Walter Benjamin, “has no theoretical armature. Its method is
additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogenous and empty time” (262), and thus belongs
to the syntax that comprises history as historicism, which is about “the present as that of the here-and-now”
(261).19 Nevertheless, when A. looks at this archive, he sees not an image of the past that “has come to a
standstill” (Benjamin 262), but a narrative of the past that lacks closure, hence his determination to locate
the forgotten reels.
The complex layers of visuality characterizing the dramatization of the Manakis’ lives and work in
Ulysses’ Gaze reinforces this. The black-and-white footage of The Weavers dissolves into a monochromatic
grey screen that, in turn, becomes a vibrant blue, the blue of the Thessaloniki port and sky, but also of
oneiric memory-time, a scene that continues the Manakis motif. The action that takes place on the
promenade unfolds in double time both visually and chronologically: it is set in the past, winter 1954, when
Yannakis Manakis is trying, with a camera on a tripod, to capture a blue boat sailing away; but it also
unfolds in A.’s present-time in Thessaloniki where he comes to gather information about his documentary
from Yannakis’ apprentice. The overlap of the past and the present is mediated through this (nameless)
apprentice who narrates to A. what happened on that winter day. His is what Gérard Genette calls
“simultaneous narrative” (217), a narrative that “condenses” (157n) two different events, one from the past
and one from the present. The apprentice’s recollection of the past is, then, endowed with a performative
function, for his act of narration in the present instantaneously dramatizes what he narrates about the past.
The apprentice and A., in contrast to Manakis who is dressed in 50’s style, wear contemporary clothing.
6
When the camera begins to focus on A. as he enters the scene, the condensed narration and visuality are
maintained, for we continue to see the blue boat sailing away.
It is during this visually and technically stunning scene that we hear Yannakis’ apprentice sharing
with A. information that is going to determine the course of the latter’s journey:
It was the winter of 1954. Yannakis saw a blue ship moored over there in the harbor of
Thessaloniki. . . . He had set his heart on photographing the boat as it left the harbor. One
morning the ship sailed away . . . He died that same evening. As I wrote to you, he kept
rambling on about three undeveloped reels, a film which for some reason was never
developed since then, since the beginning of the century. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
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As the apprentice nears the end of his narrative, we hear for the first time what will become the film’s
musical leit motif, and this, together with A.’s words, “The three reels, the three reels . . . the journey,”
signals the beginning of his quest. Above all, it signals A.’s “zero-hour,” the shift from the empty,
homogeneous time the condensed narrative creates into a moment when A. appears to adopt a historical
materialist approach to the past. As Benjamin says,
Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but also their zero-hour
[Stillstellung]. Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions,
there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad. The historical
materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a
monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour [Stillstellung] of
events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past. He
perceives it, in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history.
(262-63)
Even though A.’s journey takes him through some of the same territory that the Manakis brothers traveled
through to take photographs and shoot their films, he does not mimic their traveling and recording method
as itinerant filmmakers who inadvertently became historiographers. Instead, because he sees the missing
cans of film as dialectically related to history,20 as objects that still have relevance in the present, despite
the fact that he identifies his journey as personal, what he wants to bring to light is also political.
His physical journey ends at Sarajevo, under siege in both real and filmic time, the city where the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a nationalist Serb led
to the WW I. There is no evidence suggesting that Yannakis or Milton Manakis ever visited the city, but
many of the events they recorded were a direct result of that war. Nevertheless, while Ulysses’ Gaze is set
during the Bosnian War and evokes WW I, it remains focused exclusively on A.’s trajectory. A. is cast as a
diasporic subject whose “embodied knowledge” (Marks 2) unfolds for the viewer through “a traumatic
interrogation of personal and family memories only to create a place were no history is certain” (Marks 5).
But while A.’s physical journey is paralleled by his recall of the past—a “turn to memory [that] is also a
turn to the affective or felt experience of history” (Chetkovich 37)—these memories do not sway him away
from his goal. His fixation on locating the reels—an instance of the Benjaminian monad—translates the
empty, homogeneous time of cultural memory into the zero-hour of history A. inhabits. A. considers the
reels—forgotten and undeveloped for almost an entire century—as objects having a radical messianic
character that may change the course of history, which is not to say that he is attributing to them an
apocalyptic messianism, the kind that promises the fulfillment of history. But the reels are not what Terry
Eagleton would call an “instantiation of some universal essence”; instead, they demand a “microscopic
gaze [that] estranges the everyday into the remarkable” (Eagleton 328). It is in this context that A.’s
approach to the past materializes Angelopoulos’ engagement with history.
VI
Widely seen as a “director of History” (Stathi 11), Angelopoulos has produced highly acclaimed, albeit not
commercial, films that cast history “with a capital H” (Horton 109). In his earlier films, Days of ’36 (Meres
tou 36) (1972), The Travelling Players (O Thiassos) (1975) and Vogage to Kithira (Taxithi sta Kithira)
(1983), but also in his most recent Eternity and One Day (Mia Aioniotita kai Mia Mera) (1998), and the
first film of a recently announced trilogy, The Weeping Meadow (To Livadi pou Dakryzei) (2004),
history—in particular the troubled history of Greece and its diasporic communities—certainly figures large.
As Christian Zimmer argues, Angelopoulos’ relationship with history is articulated through “the twin figure
of metaphor and metonymy, in particular a cadaver that takes the place of, that becomes, history” (93).
Indeed, Angelopoulos’ entire oeuvre could be seen as a journey through the ravages of history. Yet, despite
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his preoccupation with historical events and the Greek nation-state’s trajectory through various wars, its
diasporic dispersion, or its Civil War (1946-49), Angelopoulos’ treatment of history avoids the traps of
realism. As Stathi puts it, “Angelopoulos reproduces a facet of History, representing those elements of it
that have been ‘exiled’ or, better, letting these elements represent themselves” (12). Concerned with the
politics of representation, his cinematography explores history through the exigencies of cultural
memory—“memories that are forbidden, memories denied, memories obsessively caressed, morbidly
blocked, memories forgotten” (Amengual 39). It is with the remains—the debris—of history that he is
fascinated with.
For Angelopoulos, preoccupation with history writ large does not imply a fetishization of
historical events that have had a momentous impact on a nation-state and its subjects. Rather, it points to
how such historical turning points, because they are indelibly imprinted on the national character of
subjects, can be transformed into social myth, namely, an ideological rendering of past events that can
affect the course of the present. As Stathi says, “the mythical dimension of Angelopoulos’ work appears a
posteriori. It is not myth that becomes History, but History that announces its truthfulness through myth. In
these terms, historical truth is possible only when ‘master narratives’ are demythologized” (13). This is
precisely what Angelopoulos’ films set out to do. In this context, cultural memory is the embodiment of
history into the political unconscious of nation-states and diasporic groups; it relates aspects of the
originary narratives of nations, but is also fed by the vicissitudes of the present. In this respect, cultural
memory is always inscribed in the present tense, in that it unfolds as a recollection of the past that is
simultaneous a translation informed by the ideological forces that shape the present. Thus cultural memory
as embodied history is rarely a matter of simply recollecting the bare outlines of an event. It is always
inflected by affect, the affect that comes from the usually unresolved dialectic structure of memories:
memories of victory or defeat, of hegemonic power or shared guilt, of personal exile or national
humiliation. It is the affect that accompanies the cultural archive of national and/or diasporic groups and
individual subjects, as well as the affect that marks those disenfranchised by the master narratives of
nation-states, that endows embodied history with the power to re-emerge as a specter that can either wield
violence or, as seems to be A.’s hope, exorcise the ferocity of national passions in the name of forgotten
things.
It is, then, the national doxa embedded in cultural memory that Angelopoulos’ films attempt to
question by turning their protagonists’, as wells as the viewers’, gaze toward what has been mislaid,
repressed, or vanished. Intricately interwoven, historical time and mythic time in his films are structured in
highly allusive and intertextual ways that often border on allegory. The larger-than-life statue of Lenin on a
barge that sails down the Danube, with A. on it, is an allegorical instance, albeit too obvious, of the demise
of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Dismembered, and watched from the riverbanks by
peasants who make the sign of the cross, it is an instantiation of the debris of history. As such, it creates a
temporality that questions as much historical truth as those who stand guard for it. Along the same lines,
war, often the setting of many of Angelopoulos’ films, is not glorified; rather, it operates as a sign of
crisis—a crisis of political systems, epistemologies, the humanistic tradition. On the cusp of modernity and
postmodernity, Angelopoulos’ cinematic techniques and his treatment of the themes that obsess him bind
the viewer’s mind to actuality, but also draw attention to it as artifice. It is not surprising, then, that he
resists some of his critics’ attempts to find a “documentary thrust” in his films. It is worth quoting
Angelopoulos at length on this point:
I wouldn’t call this sense of history a “documentary thrust.” I rather think it is a Greek
tradition. If we recall the Greek classics, we notice that most of them work with myths
referring to much older periods, and in this context history is used as a continuous backdrop,
independent of any thematic concerns. My attachment to our history derives from the fact
that I am Greek, from the overall relationship of history with Greek art and specifically with
literature, and in this century, with Greek cinema. (O’Grady 70)
My characters assume all the elements of epic cinema or, if I may say so, those of
epic poetry, typically featuring clear-cut personae. . . . they serve as carriers of history or
ideas. . . . My characters are not being analyzed . . . They search for lost things, all that was
lost in the rupture between desire and reality. Until not very long ago the history of the world
was based on desire; the desire to change the world one way or another. Now at the end of
the century we realize that whatever was desired never really happened, and it did not
happen for reasons that I am unable to explain. Perhaps it was impossible to change things
using the specific methods that were employed at the time, but in any case, we are left with
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the experience of our failure, with the ashes of the disappointment of dreams that never
materialized. (O’Grady 69)
This statement is an apt description of what transpires in Ulysses’ Gaze. In Angelopoulos’ cinematography,
history, together with the losses it involves, is almost invariably explored through the prism of a single
male protagonist, a blind spot in his otherwise multifaceted examination of the past. Nevertheless, though
Angelopoulos stresses his attachment to Greek history, his cinematic gaze, like that of A.’s, exceeds the
monoculturalism usually associated with cultural memory. Against the chauvinism that often marks Greek,
as well as Greek diasporic, subjects’ articulations of Greek nationalism, Angelopoulos’ treatment of
cultural memory tends to expose the “imagined” nature of national affiliations. This inclination to release
differences that have been repressed mirrors the closet idealism that I believe underlies Angelopoulos’
desire to create characters and films that trope toward what he calls a “new humanism.” We get an inkling
of what this “new humanism” may entail by what transpires when A. reaches Sarajevo.
VII
If, despite its Greek signature, Ulysses’ Gaze uncovers cultural differences and events that are often
repressed when cultural memory is constructed in a homogeneous fashion, it is because Angelopoulos
seeks to explode, on the one hand, the continuum of history and, on the other, the cultural solipsism of
national identities. This is one of the reasons why A.—whose full name is never mentioned either by him or
by any of the other characters—assumes different personae before he arrives in Sarajevo. By playing
philoromanian Greek-Vlach Yannakis interrogated in 1916 by Bulgarian officers, or the Bulgarian Vania in
1915, to keep his widow’s memory of him alive for a while longer,21 or by having his own identity
suspended, for security and other reasons when he becomes “Nobody,” A. functions as a first-hand witness
of the human displacements and catastrophes in the Balkans. The affect that marks these unsettling and
transitory scenes does not so much express A.’s emotional response to these encounters that are both of the
past and of the present as it materializes the affection of what Gilles Deleuze calls “recollection-images”:
scenes where private and public memories meet, “strangely active fossils, radioactive, inexplicable in the
present . . . and all the more harmful and autonomous” (113). Such scenes, as Marks writes, “are ‘harmful’
because they cannot be reconciled with either official history or private memory—but they are more
harmful to official history, because they falsify it or reveal it to be incomplete” (51). If A. can walk away
from these scenes of history seemingly unscathed, it is because these recollection-images have the ability to
“disengage[] . . . affective response from action” (Marks 28). In this light, A.’s running away from the
Bulgarian Circe-like widow’s pathos and mourning is not a sign of his indifference or callousness; rather, it
gestures toward the “carnality of memory” (Marks 73), the ways in which memory is embedded in the
body, how corporeality is part and parcel of the survival of cultural memory. Moreover, it points to the
extent to which the public and the private are imbricated in, and mediate, each other.
Unlike Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart’s definition of traumatic memory as a memory
that “has no social component” and that, in contrast to “narrative memory, it is a social act [that] . . . is not
addressed to anybody” (163), the traumatic memories and encounters A. has to contend with while he
travels operate as a social act that deconstructs what appears to be the solipsism of his quest. He thus
materializes yet another thesis from Benjamin’s essay on the construction of history: “To articulate what is
past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a
moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as
if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject” (255). Seen in this
context, the war zone A. traverses reveals what happens when cultural memory is repressed as well as when
it is in circulation. Here, the old adage that we cannot afford to forget history is mocked by the calamities
that often occur when history—history as cultural memory—is remembered. Shot during the Bosnian War,
Ulysses’ Gaze not only, to use a word Benjamim often employs in his essay, “explodes” the homogeneity
of cultural memory, thus showing cultural memory in action to be often synonymous with the return of the
repressed, but also demonstrates its elasticity and hybridity. Those acting in the name of their communities’
cultural memories are not always in control of the effects of remembering. But as Slavoj Zizek writes,
“there is no repression previous to the return of the repressed; the repressed content does not precede its
return in symptoms, there is no way to conceive it in its purity undistorted by ‘compromises’ that
characterize the formation of the symptoms” (14). A. goes after the first filmic gaze at the region not
because he thinks the missing reels contain testimony about what things were like then, testimony that may
redeem the present of its insanity, but because, as “a witness-traveller” (Felman 32), he is attentive to
memories as they “flash in a moment of danger,” as they document for the viewers what happens when
cultural memory resurrects the specters of Balkan history now.
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This is one of the reasons why Angelopoulos has A. locate the missing reels in Sarajevo. When A.
arrives in Sarajevo,22 he is unsure that he has reached his destination. “Is this Sarajevo?”, he keeps asking
the handful of rattled people he encounters on the streets of what has been turned into a ghost city. What he
sees—empty streets, bombed buildings, abandoned vehicles, smoldering ruins, a person here and there
huddled in fear of the snipers and carrying cans of precious water or fuel—speaks to the zero-hour of this
city’s history. It is not a coincidence that A.’s journey culminates in a city embodying the wreckage of
modernity. It is coming face to face with the ashes of history that validates his quest. Although the loss of
memory the missing reels represent may be seen as a sign of liberation, as a release from the ruins of
history cultural memory both embodies and triggers, Sarajevo under siege conveys a contrary message: loss
of memory can also be the reason for this war’s catastrophes. Loss of certain kinds of memory, then, is
profoundly ambivalent: synonymous with repression, it has the potential at once to cause violence and to
become an occasion for a fresh start, the kind of moment that the Benjaminian historian-materialist can
seize on in order to rapture history’s continuum.
It is important to recall here that the Manakis brothers filmed and photographed the people in the
region without distinguishing between Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians or Serbs, between Orthodox, Muslim
or Catholic subjects. If it is this “imaginary of fraternity” A. seeks to recover in their lost film, Richard
Werbner reminds us that such an imaginary is often accompanied by “a narrative of fratricide” (74). It is
the absence of fratricide that guarantees the cohesiveness of a nation state, precisely what Sarajevo under
siege exemplifies in a paradoxical fashion. While Ulysses’ Gaze does not attempt to offer any utopian
solutions about the carnage of the Bosnian War, and implicitly questions the ideology of inclusion and
integration that the Manakis’ oeuvre may be seen to project, it also casts doubt on the euphoria that often
characterizes the study of cultural memory. For what memory discloses is not always already
emancipatory. Distinguishing between “immediate memory which is readily accessible” and “antimemory” that “is imagined as buried or even repressed remembrance,” Werbner points out that “antimemory may serve the ends of the nation-building regime, of the state in the making, or it may become the
defensive or subversive drive of subalterns asserting themselves against the state or its dominant elites”
(74). Sarajevo under siege materializes the crisis that occurs when these two kinds of memory collapse into
each other; it performs the “affective dissonance” (Chow 59) that emerges from memory when it becomes
fossilized and fetishized, a metaphorical as well as literal “burial-place where lost identities are mourned, in
a desperate attempt to keep their atrophied representations alive” (Werbner 30). The three different funereal
processions—Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim—that reach, under A.’s distressed gaze, a Sarajevo
cemetery at the same time epitomize this: three different congregations, but all three mourning similar
losses, losses that have been caused at once by the virus of amnesia and mnemonic fever.
VII
A. comes to Sarajevo because this is where the Manakis’ three undeveloped reels have ended up.
Ivo Levi (played by the late Erland Josephson), the archivist and technician of the Sarajevo Cinematheque,
has been trying to discover the now unknown chemical formula required for developing the reels. As a
result of the war, however, he has put the project on hold: “It was a challenge,” he explains to A., “finding
the old chemical formula. I kept changing it over and over again. I spent endless nights in the old lab
listening to the fluids, the sound of their flow. There were times that the fluids sounded like a song . . . I
had made headway, only a detail was missing, but the war broke out. I had to concentrate on saving the
[film] archive. It was our memory. I had to save it.” Trying to persuade Levi to resume his abandoned
project, A. tells him that he does not “have the right” to preserve these films as valuable, yet undeciphered,
archives: “It’s the war, insanity, all the more reason . . . you’ve got no right.” But in Levi A. has found a
kindred spirit, someone who suffers from the same archive fever that has turned this Greek American
filmmaker, who holds a Greek passport and often speaks in Greek, into a wanderer. “What am I,” Levi
says, when he agrees to give developing the Manakis’ reels one more chance, “if not a collector of vanished
gazes?”23 Archive fever is a condition that, as Jacques Derrida explains, encapsulates the Freudian pleasure
principle and its twin, the death drive (13, 29). If archive fever is a malady, it is precisely because the
subject experiences the search for the archive as being both inevitable and necessary. Like Levi, A., too, is
“in need of archives” (Derrida 91). And it is this need that renders A.’s search for the Manakis brothers’
first gaze at once into a malady and a passion. Archive fever “can mean something else than to suffer from
a sickness, from a trouble . . . It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching
for the archive right where it slips away” (Derrida 91).
The archive, in this case, does not slip away, for Levi’s renewed efforts produce the desired result.
Still, that the pivotal moment of A.’s quest takes place in the lab of the semi-destroyed Cinematheque, that
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the “first glance” demands intensive mediation and a new technology before it yields its contents, and that,
above all, the man who releases, what he calls, the Manakis’ “captive gaze” is killed soon after—all this
suggests the suspension of the archive’s meaning, the deferral of Angelopoulos’ “new humanism.” As a
relic of another era, the Manakis’ film represents the symbolic guarantee of the region’s intercultural
identity while promising, at the same time, escape from amnesia or mis-remembering. It may be, from A.’s
perspective, an inaugural glance, a record of the advent of yet another stage of modernity in the region, but
it offers no wager for an authentic representation of long-lost memories. Because it resists easy
consumption and commodification, because its ambivalence and value are symptomatic of the mediation it
requires, it seems to embody what Andreas Huyssen calls twilight memory: “Twilight memories,” he
writes, “are both . . . generational memories on the wane due to the passing of time and the continuing
speed of technological modernization . . . and memories that reflect the twilight status of memory itself.
Twilight is that moment of the day that foreshadows the night of forgetting, but that seems to slow time
itself, an in-between state in which the last light of the day may still play out its ultimate marvels. It is
memory’s privileged time” (3). In this regard, twilight memory is also constitutive of the zero-hour of
history, the chronotope where A.’s archive fever takes place. If A. is consumed by his obsession with the
undeveloped reels, this consumption seems to be an unavoidable, and incurable, symptom of his archive
fever. Moreover, the archive as a vanished gaze may resist consumption, but it itself threatens to consume
those whose gazes it attracts. Indeed, it seems that in order for the archive to manifest itself, someone has
first to vanish.
VIII
While waiting for the film to dry, Levi invites A. to join him, and the other denizens of Sarajevo,
who have gone out on the streets to stroll without fear of the snipers because the city is vanished in fog—
the only time the snipers have no visibility. When the city comes alive, so do the remains of Western
culture. Actors perform Romeo and Juliet, the city’s youth symphony, consisting of Serbs, Croats and
Muslims,24 plays Vivaldi, and the citizens under siege recover their bourgeois habits—strolling leisurely,
greeting each other, pausing to watch or listen to the free performances. It is an interesting coincidence that
the release of the Manakis brothers’ gaze is accompanied by an affirmation of Western classics—none of
them local. But this semblance of normalcy is crudely interrupted. The cover of fog this time does not
protect Levi and his family, for they are killed by a group of men in cold blood. We never see the killers,
nor do we find out what their ethnicity is, nor if they are in plain citizens’ clothes or military garb. While
Ulysses’ Gaze remains obsessed with visuality throughout, in this scene (shot in Belgrade) the act of
seeing, suspended by the veil of fog, is replaced by aurality. We hear the disembodied, world-weary voice
of the killers’ leader, who calmly says: “Our Lord and Maker made a mess of things, Sir. A fine mess.”
This penultimate sequence of scenes, which ends with A. wailing in despair, eradicates any
illusions the viewer might have that A.’s journey is one of nostalgia or recuperation. If, in Ulysses’ Gaze,
oppressors and oppressed, killers and killed, malefactors and their casualties are all deliberately represented
in a manner that resists easy identification, it is not because Angelopoulos lapses into cultural or historical
relativism. Rather, he suggests that the villains in the present tense of the film might have been victims
once. If there are no immaculate subjects in history, what possible value can the Manakis brothers’ “first
glance” have? When A. returns to the lab to watch the Manakis’ released gaze, the viewers of Ulysses’
Gaze do not get to see it. No longer a forgotten archive, nor a film we can consume, it resists disclosure.
Moreover, it forfeits elucidation, for the viewer has no way of ascertaining its impact on A.. Instead, as a
result of the circumstances and events surrounding its release, and despite A.’s earlier attempt to imagine it
as a document not loaded down by the exigencies of local ethnic politics, it becomes politically charged. It
thus operates as a “dialectical image,” an assemblage of historical, cultural and philosophical concerns that
“expose ‘progress’ as the fetishization of modern temporality” (Buck-Morss 56). If it reveals anything, this
is the imperative to devise a new method of dealing with history and cultural differences. But if there is no
indication of the afterlife of the archive, there is also no clear answer as what this new method may entail.
What is certain is that if the future to come is to be different from the present, it cannot come in the name of
the already established order of knowledge. This is not to be taken as a refutation of cultural memory.
Rather, it stresses the potential of art to usher in an era of “new humanism,” albeit a humanism that is not
entirely divested of the “old” humanism’s legacy. If A. is witnessing the dawn of a new episteme emerging
from the Manakis brothrers’ film and from his traumatic experience in Sarajevo, this new order of things is
complicitous with the old way of looking at the Balkans.
This is one of the reasons, I believe, why the film ends with another quotation, this time a literary
one. Gazing straight at the camera, A. recites (in free translation) the following lines from Homer:
11
When I return,
It will be with another man’s name.
My coming will be unexpected.
If you look at me unbelieving, and say “it’s not you.”
I will show you signs and you will believe me.
I will tell you about the lemon tree in your garden
The corner window that lets in the moonlight
And then sights of the body, signs of love.
And as we climb trembling to our own room
Between one embrace and the next
Between lovers’ calls, I will tell you about the journey all night long
And then all the nights to come
Between one embrace and the next
Between lovers’ calls and the whole human adventure
The story that never ends.
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Ulysses’ Gaze ends in the future tense, a future that contains the past but also bears a new “name.” The
lines A. recites are those of another archive, the Western archive of cultivated memory. He may operate as
an embodiment of his culture’s history, but he is neither looking backwards nor is he quoting faithfully.
Still, there is no guarantee that the comfort he hopes to find in the familiarity the past affords will come
soon. The story of the whole human adventure continues. A.’s journey, unlike that of Odysseus’, does not
see “home” as its destination. And though his “homecoming” is marked by violence and death, unlike his
namesake hero who kills those who have abused and threatened his sovereignty in his kingdom and
household, and stops his violent rampage with “a heavy heart,” and only after the intervention of a god, A.
recoils from the violence he witnesses; his soliloquy that punctuates the end of the film is about love.25 The
modern-day Ulysses’ “adventure” is interpersonal and intranational. Above all, it is about art, not about
how art can transgress the “fine mess” the unleashing of cultural memory can often lead to, but about how a
filmmaker enters the minefield cultural memory is, and the ethical responsibilities involved in acting out on
its behest.
VIIII
The last image, as well as gaze, in the film is that of A. brooding. The brooder, as Benjamin suggests, “is a
man who once had the solution to the Great Problem, but then forgot it. And now he broods, not so much
over the matter as over his past brooding about it. The thought of the brooder stands under the sign of
memory.”26
Works Cited
A License to Remember: Je me souviens. Dir. Thierry Le Brun. Prod. Adam Symansky. National Film
Board of Canada, 2002.
Amengual, Barthélemy. “Théo Angelopoulos: Une Poétique de l’Histoire.” Études Cinematographiques,
142 (1985): 31-55.
Angelopoulos, Theo, dir.. Ulysses’ Gaze. [To Vlemma tou Odyssea.] Greece, France, Italy, 1995.
_____. With Tonino Guerra and Petros Markaris. Ulysses’ Gaze [To Vlemma tou Odyssea] Screenplay.
Athens: Kastanionti, 1995.
_____. The Suspended Step of the Stork. [To Meteoro Vima tou Pelargou]. France, Italy, Switzerland,
Greece, 1991.
_____. “Rigas Feraios’ Map.” Balkanmedia, IV, 3 (1995): 16-7.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed., with an Introduction, Hannah
Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken, 1969.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT P, 1991.
Chetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2003.
Christodoulou, Christos K. [Χριστοδουλου, Χρηστος Κ.]. The Manakis Brothers’ Photogenic Balkans [Τα
Φωτογενη Βαλκανια των Αδελφων Μανακη]. Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2:The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989.
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Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1996.
Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, Or towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso, 1981.
Fainaru, Dan, ed. Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2001.
Felman, Soshana. “Education and Crisis.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 13-60.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Foreword Jonathan
Culler. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
Gourgouris, Stathis. Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 2003.
_____. Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 1996.
Hassiotis [library book has gone missing – looking for the source elsewhere]
Horton, Andrew. “‘What do our souls seek?’: an interview with Theo Angelopoulos.” In The Last
Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Horton (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1997) 96110.
Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge,
1995.
Manakis, Milton and Yannakis, Dirs. The Weavers [I Ifantries]. Avthella, Greece, 1905.
Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York:
Columbia UP, 1992.
Marks, Laura U.. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2000.
O’Grady, Gerald. “Angelopoulos’ Philosophy of Film.” An Interview. In Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews.
In Fainaru. 66-74.
Rouillard, Jacques. “L’énigme de la devise du Québec: à quells souvenirs fait-elle reference?” Le Bulletin
Histoire Politique, 13, 2 (hiver 2005): 127-45.
Stathi, Irini [Σταθη, Ειρηνη]. “Thodoros Angelopoulos: Journey toward the Frontiers of History” [Θοδωρος
Αγγελοπουλος: Ταξιδι στα Ορια της Ιστοριας]. In Thodoros Angelopoulos. A publication of the 41st
Film Festival of Thessaloniki. Ed. Irini Stathi. Athens: Kastaniotis, 2000. 11-15.
van der Kolk, Bessell A. , and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the
Engraving of Trauman.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 158-82.
Werbner, Richard. “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in
Zimbabwe.” In Memory and the Postcolony. Ed. Richard Werbner. London: Zed Books, 1998. 71102.
Zimmer, Christian. “Le Cadavre et l’Histoire.” Études Cinematographiques (special issue on
Angelopoulos, ed. Michel Estève), 142 (1985): 93-6.
Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Notes
1
Quotations from material that appears in Works Cited in French and Greek are in my translation.
I have in mind here the Oka crisis, March to September 1990, which brought out the Québec Provincial
Police and the Canadian Armed Forces in a standoff with the Mohawks on the Kanesatake Reserve. The
standoff, which resulted in three deaths and other violent and racialized attacks, was caused by a land
dispute over the expansion of a golf course on what is sacred ground for the Mohawks in the area.
3
See Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP,
1971, 1977). There were slaves in New France before the first recorded reference to Olivier Le Jeune, “the
first slave to be sold in New France,” brought directly from Africa at the age of six. Le Jeune was still a
“‘petit nègre’” when he converted, but, as his teacher, after whom he was named, Jesuit missionary Paul Le
Jeune, wrote, he spoke a blunt truth in retort to the statement that all people are equal in the eyes of the
Christian God: “‘You say by baptism I shall be like you: I am black and you are white, I must have my skin
off then in order to be like you’” (1). By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were about four
2
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thousand slaves, both Black and Aboriginal, in New France, most of them living in and around Montreal
(Winks 1-23).
4
Throughout my argument, I employ the term history in a rather loose way, as a reference to official
discourse. A fuller discussion of the relationship of memory to history as a discipline, genre, or practice
would take me too far afield. See, for example, Dominique La Capra, History and Memory after Auschwitz
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998) and Le Goff.
5
This is a recurring theme in his work. Andrew Horton’s The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of
Contemplation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) addresses this and related themes.
6
Rey Chow employs the concept of “self-regard,” introduced by Freud in “On Narcissism,” to refer to the
necessary, indeed healthy, kind of “narcissism” the diasporic subject must employ in order to achieve “selfpreservation” in light of the negative construction of its identity by “mainstream society.” “In the visual as
well as social senses of the term,” Chow argues, “self-regard is the complicated result of the self’s
negotiations with the observing collective conscience.” Rey Chow, “The Secrets of Ethnic Abjection,”
“Race” Panic and the Memory of Migration, eds. Meaghan Morris and Brett de Bary (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong UP, 2001) 64.
7
On the role of the gaze in the film, see also Horton 184 (see note 4).
8
On this point, see Angelopoulos’ comment in Geoff Andrew’s article cum interview, “Homer’s Where the
Heart Is: Ulysses’ Gaze,” in Fainaru (91-2).
9
I have in mind here James Clifford’s and Paul Gilroy’s employment of these terms. See the former’s
Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997) and
the latter’s The Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
1993).
10
See, for example, Catherine Portuges’ review (untitled) in American History Review (October 1996),
1158-59. Fredric Jameson, too, situates the New Year’s Eve family reunions in Bucharest, as opposed to
Constanza (86); see his essay, “Theo Angelopoulos: the past as history, the future as form,” in Horton 7895.
11
This is one of the longest, and continuous, scenes (fifteen minutes long) about memory in the film, as we
see A. as a young boy spend five consecutive New Year Eve’s gatherings, 1945-50, with his family.
12
Although I have consulted various sources and web sites that refer to the Manakis brothers, for this
detail, as well as other references to the work and lives of the Manakis brothers, I am indebted to Christos
Christodoulou’s book, The Manakis Brothers’ Photogenic Balkans. I am grateful to John Papargyris of
Birmingham, United Kingdom, who located and sent me this book.
13
As is also the case with a number of their films and other details of the Manakis’ lives, there is
discrepancy between various sources as to the exact date of this documentary. According to Christodoulou,
it was made in 1906; Angelopoulos and some web sites date it in 1905.
14
When Monastiri (today called Bitola), where the two brothers lived and worked for many years, was
taken over by the Germans and Bulgarians during WW I, the latter, in a search of the brothers’
photographic studio, came upon three guns and a small amount of explosives. Yannakis was arrested and
convicted as a spy, but his death sentence was converted to exile in Philipoupolis, now Plovdin, Bulgaria.
During his exile there between 1916 and 1919, he continued his work as photographer. While A. travels by
train from Monastiri to Skopje, in a subtle shift from the present to the past, he assumes the persona of
Yannakis, and is arrested by Bulgarian border guards who interrogate him about his alleged espionage
activities.
15
The Manakis brothers’ name appears in different variants in official documents and the media of the
time—Maniaki, Manakia, or Manaka—but Manakis is the most frequently used and the one recorded in
death certificates.
16
Because the 1870 Ottoman declaration of the independence of the Orthodox Bulgarian Church, known as
the Exarchate, applied to places that could claim two-thirds of their population as Bulgarian, there was a
concerted attempt, through the founding of Bulgarian schools and financial assistance, and subsequently
through warfare, to make local populations adopt Bulgarian national identity. Romania, too, though it
shared no boundaries with the region, launched a major educational and financial propaganda effort to
Romanize the local population. See, for example, Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of
Empire (Oxford UP, 2001).
17
Predictably, given the history of the region, the two brothers’ oeuvre has itself become an instrument of
national politics. While Greek historians and filmographers consider them to be Greek Vlachs, in the
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Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia they are claimed as promoters of the Macedonian national
identity. For example, this is how Cyber Macedonia reads the brothers’ accomplishments: “It was the
manner in which the brothers documented the traditional Macedonian customs, rites, and everyday life that
really set the brothers’ work on a unique level. They filmed villagers, street cleaners, soldiers, mutineers,
weddings, processions, and the festivities associated with the celebration of Macedonian holidays. . . .
Without the work of the Manakis brothers, the propaganda spread by a few of the world’s very extremist
countries would have been made all the more easier than it is today. In effect, the Manaki brothers, by
having captured the Macedonian economic and cultural life, unintentionally rose to become promoters of
the Macedonian identity” (http://www.cybermacedonia.com/manaki.html|, February 25, 2006). In contrast
to this reading that reduces the complexity of their work, if not that of their lives, to monoculturalism, when
A. tries to get some answers about the Manakis’ film from the woman working in their archive in Skopje,
in response to her silence and suspicion, he says, “I’m not trying to prove anything.”
18
The two brothers saw their first film—“live photographs,” Milton called it (Christodoulou 89)—in
Bucharest in 1905. Yannakis became so obsessed with acquiring a film camera that, instead of returning to
their photo studio, he departed for London where he purchased a Charles Urban Bioscope 300 camera. It
was immediately after his return to Monastiri that the two brothers went back to their home village to shoot
The Weavers.
19
Though the page numbers refer to Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as it appears in
Harry Zohn’s translation in Illuminations, I am actually quoting from Dennis Redmond’s translation of this
essay, which I find to be smoother. See http://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/benjamin/1940/history.html, or http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html (January 13,
2006).
20
Fredric Jameson makes a similar point.
21
The years in which these scenes take place are not provided in the film itself, but they are in the film’s
Greek screenplay. The screenplay also includes a catalogue of scenes shot but not included in the final cut,
as well as other interesting details.
22
When the war conditions made it possible, Angelopoulos shot most of the scenes in the film in their
actual locations, such as Koritsa, Thessaloniki, Florina, Monastiri (Bitola), Skopje, Bucharest, and
Belgrade. However, the train scenes were shot en route Thessaloniki-Skidra-Thessaloniki in November
1994, while some of the Sarajevo scenes were filmed in Vukovar and others in Athens, as the shooting took
place at the same time as Sarajevo’s siege. The Sarajevo Cinematheque is Vukovar’s bombed theatre, and
the Romeo and Juliet performance was inspired by a similar performance that Angelopoulos’ crew
witnessed while shooting in Vukovar. See Angelopoulos’ screenplay (125).
23
Levi’s Jewishness is certainly not accidental, but I do not have enough space to discuss it here.
24
I am indebted for this detail to Angelopoulos’ screenplay; the ethnic identities of the musicians are not
apparent in the film.
25
The relationship of history to power, to the sovereignty of subjectivity, and to the present is a concern
underlying virtually all of Angelopoulos’ films. For various treatments of these themes see L’Histoire,
l’idéologie et le pouvoir, ed. Michel Estève (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1984).
26
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt 1972-), vol. 5, 455. Cited in translation in Max
Pensky, “Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of Passagenwerk,” in Walter
Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996): 164-89.
15
Petra Tournay-Theodotou
Cyprus College
Strange Encounters: Nationhood and the Stranger in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant
Shore
[H]ave you not observed that it is characteristic of a well-bred dog to behave with
the utmost gentleness to those it is used to and knows, but to be savage to
strangers … it is a trait that shows real discrimination and a truly philsophical
nature … for the dog distinguishes the sight of a friend and foe simply by knowing
one and not knowing the other.
(Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970: 111)
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In this paper I wish to explore the novel’s multiple constructions of the stranger based
on race, gender, religion and class, predominantly in the figures of the two protagonists
Dorothy, an aging white English woman and Solomon, an African refugee. This
discussion will be linked to an analysis of the construction of places and spaces (the
neighborhood/ the village) as miniature representations of the construction of the nation.
The analysis will hence revolve around various kinds of dis-placement – both spatial and
psychological - presented in the novel.
“England has changed. These days it is difficult to tell who’s from around here and
who’s not. Who belongs and who’s a stranger. It’s disturbing. It doesn’t feel right”
(Phillips, 2003: 3).1
These opening sentences of A Distant Shore are of immediately programmatic value
for the entire novel as they introduce several of the novel’s main concerns such as
England as a society in flux, the question of belonging and un-belonging, the use of the
key term ‘stranger’ and the irritation these issues provoke in Dorothy. This opening
concisely summarizes the destabilization of the experience of home that contemporary
societies are currently undergoing. In her extremely enlightening study entitled Strange
Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000), Sara Ahmed describes these
changes to the once familiar space of home as follows: “there is always the possibility of
an encounter with strangeness at stake, even within the home … homes do not stay the
same as the space which is simply the familiar. There is movement and dislocation
within the forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance” (88).
Dorothy’s disturbance with the changes and her general mental instability aptly reflect
the current ‘disturbed’ state of the British nation. In addition to reading Dorothy as an
allegory of Britain as suggested by Benedicte Ledent, I wish to argue that the depictions
of the old village of Weston and the ‘new development’ of Stoneleigh represent miniature
allegorical spatial constructions of the present anatomy of the nation at large. In this
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reading, the village and/or neighborhood function as a representation of the nation on a
small scale as a “tiny, underdeveloped nation” (Hess/ Morris, 1975: 16).
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To begin with, the contrastive use of the adjectives ‘old’ and ‘new’ suggest that the
existing village represents the old England with its old ways whereas the ‘new
development’ suggests developments, a change and a departure from old ways.
Furthermore, the location of the “‘new houses on the hill’” and “on the edge of Weston”
(3) captures its detached and marginal location on the periphery of the center, Weston. I
am deliberately employing colonial discourse here as the village also comes to represent
Britain’s desperate effort to hold on to its glorious colonial past, which is illustrated in its
unwillingness to “give up its name and identity” (3) and in the addition of ‘Weston’ to
‘Stoneleigh’ on letters “as though the former civilizes the latter” (3). The spatial
construction together with the implied wealth of the inhabitants of the new development
moreover suggests its economic superiority whereas the village with its high rate of
unemployment represents the nation’s general decline as an economic power. Class and
an accompanying sense of inferiority on the part of the villagers thus also come to play an
important role in the division of the two communities. This segregation becomes
particularly evident when one of the female villagers refers to the new settlers as “the
newcomers, or posh so-and-sos” (5) and Dorothy in turn refers to the woman as “vulgar”
(5) thus making the wish for social distinction a mutual one with Dorothy registering: “So
our village was divided in two” (4). In the context of my suggested allegorical reading of
the village and the new development as representative of Britain, the division between the
two communities thus encapsulates the tension between a conservative essentialist Britain
with its inability to accommodate change on the one hand and the demands of a society in
flux on the other. In the novel this division is furthermore emphasized by the use of the
‘us’/’them’ dichotomy employed as much by Dorothy in her first person narrative as by,
for example, the owner of the pub.
Apart from reading the village and the new development as powerful spatial images
representing the current state of the nation, there is another ‘space’ recurrently mentioned
in the novel that invites being read as an allegory. If Benedicte Ledent reads the constant
consumption of tea by the English characters as an allegory and “a quintessential symbol
of Englishness” (2004: 157) I would like to add to this liquid allegory the spatial one of
the pub which appears to serve as a further emblem of home and Englishness. This
construction of the pub seems to be the novel’s most striking spatial image to mark the
dynamic of exclusion and inclusion. Dorothy’s conservative father, for example, regarded
pubs as a “place of refuge” (13) and insisted that “they’re about being yourself” (13) – or
as we may wish to add about ‘being English’. Considering that the history of the pub – or
the public house – actually goes back to Roman times, this institution can be regarded as
yet another ‘quintessential symbol of Englishness’ referred to in the novel. It is therefore
not surprising that Dorothy doesn’t feel comfortable to invite Solomon to go to the pub
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with her (45) and that Solomon doesn’t feel welcome in a pub as he keeps rejecting his
Irish friend’s Mike’s invitations to accompany him to “‘his’ pub” (286). It is also there
where Dorothy’s conflict of loyalties is played out when she resolves that she doesn’t
want Solomon to “become a problem in my life” (45). As a drifter between the two
spaces, the pub and the new estate, Dorothy is assigned the role of mediator between the
two worlds. If one may be tempted to read her pub strolls as an attempt at some kind of
assertion of her Englishness, it eventually only exacerbates her rejection of the village
community. During a conversation with the landlord following Solomon’s murder she
stands by him when she openly declares “Yes…He was a friend of mine” (48). In this
entire exchange the pub owner shows no true compassion for Solomon’s sad fate and is
only eager to defend the purity of the village/ nation and the innocence of its inhabitants/
citizens. Even though he does say in passing that he is sorry for Solomon, in the same
sentence – that is on the same level - he expresses his worry about the village’s reputation
(48) and is certain that it can only have been an accident and furthermore asserts that in
the village live only “[d]ecent folk committed to their families and their community. We
don’t have murderers here” (49). In response Dorothy only nods, as she has “no desire to
upset his sense of community” (49). The barkeeper’s concern for the village’s reputation,
his alliance with the rest of the villagers, together with the dual reference to community
are in fact strongly reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as an
imagined community characterized by a “deep horizontal comradeship” (1991: 7).
In this context it is interesting that Dorothy apparently thinks it more appropriate to
take Solomon to the Somalian and Mediterranean Food Hall (18), a choice of place that is
diametrically opposed to the English pub. Significantly, this ethnic restaurant is not
located in the village but in the presumably more liberal town. However, to read the
existence of ethnic restaurants as a positive sign of successful multicultural integration is
deceptive. According to Sara Ahmed, “A key aspect of multiculturalism as a policy for
managing difference is food and eating […] difference is valued insofar as it can be
incorporated into, not only the nation space, but also the individual body, the body-athome” (2000: 117). The quasi cannibalistic act of the consumption of strangeness thus
allows for a reassertion of control of the consuming native English self or again in the
words of Sara Ahmed (in a discussion of bell hooks’ article, ‘Eating the Other’): “The
white consuming subject is invited to eat the other: to take it in, digest it, and shit out the
waste. The exotic and strange foods are incorporated into the bodies of Western
consumers as that which is different, but assimilable” (2000: 117). By extension,
difference that cannot be incorporated, fully integrated and assimilated into the nation or
the body through consumption is not valued and hence becomes subject to rejection and
in the worst case violence in an effort at keeping the nation space pure, allowing only for
a certain dose of consumptive (manageable) exoticism to spice up one’s life. In this
connection, the description of the rude behaviour and abuse Mahmood, Dorothy’s
married Indian liaison, had to suffer from his white English customers when he was still
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running an Indian restaurant may serve as a further example (202). In fact, the entire
episode strongly evokes the behaviour of colonials taking over the conquered space, by
defiling it and insulting the owner in an obvious effort at reminding him who is master of
the house/nation.
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The division of the two communities is mainly communicated to the reader from
Dorothy’s perspective. Even though Dorothy is gradually revealed as an unreliable
narrator and many of her descriptions are coloured by her perception – or even willful
construction - as a stranger in her own homeland, there is nevertheless from the
beginning strong evidence that her neighbours cannot tolerate difference. On one
particular occasion Dorothy imagines that a man from the village “considers me and
everybody else in the new development to be interlopers. All of us, disturbing a pattern
that has gone on for decade after decade until Stoneleigh came along to make them feel
as though their shrinking lives, which were already blighted by closures and
unemployment, were even less important than they had hitherto imagined” (29).2 One
may argue that this quote says possibly more about Dorothy than about the man.
However, she conjures up this projection only after several encounters with some of the
villagers, which reinforce such a construction. One case in point is that of the presumably Jewish - female Dr Epstein who according to the barman in the pub would
have been much happier had Stoneleigh already been finished: “Up there they might have
fit in better, but living down here with us, well, it was difficult for them to mix” (9).
Thus, in the context of reading the neighbourhood as a miniature representation of the
nation, the people in the ‘new development’ – following the ‘us vs. them’ split – are
similarly viewed as unwanted intruders and outsiders on the level of the village as asylum
seekers and immigrants are on the level of the nation and thus again the village in nucleo
mirrors the British nation at large.
As a result of the discussion so far, the ‘other’ characters in A Distant Shore are
hence constructed as strangers on grounds of race as in the case of Solomon, gender and
religion as in the case of Dr Epstein, and even of (gender and) class as is implied in the
cases of Dorothy and Dr Epstein. As in many of his other narratives, Caryl Phillips has
thus again skillfully interwoven the uncanny quadruplet of race, gender, religion and
class into his narrative to lay bare these continued oppressions practiced in British - or for
that matter - in European society. It seems noteworthy that already two years prior to the
publication of A Distant Shore, Phillips expressed in a nutshell the concerns he was later
to fictionalize in the novel. In his essay collection A New World Order (2001) he
registered “a sharp increase in racial violence and acts of intolerance. The
homogenisation of Europe opens the door not so much to immigrants, but to nationalists
who lament the erosion of racially inscribed ‘traditional’ values” (2001: 245).
Yet, there is more to be said on Dorothy’s lucid comments on Weston’s economic
degeneration and on the effect this has on the self-esteem of its inhabitants. In her book
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Sara Ahmed contends that “[i]t is the very potential of the community to fail (or the
suppressed certainty that they have already failed as in the case of Weston/ Britain) which
is required for the constitution of the community. It is the enforcement of the boundaries
between those who are already recognized as out of place (even other fellow residents)
that allows those boundaries to be established” (2000: 26; first parenthesis my addition).
That is, Weston’s/ Britain’s security and well-being have been shaken with the closing
down of the pits and the high rate of unemployment. Nevertheless, the neighborhood
holds together but is challenged beyond endurance when the posh neighborhood is
established, an alternative to their own lives, holding up the mirror to their dire existence.
In order to preserve itself, the neighborhood/ nation has to reject ‘any’body’ – including
‘other’ English people - who might threaten its perceived communal bond. This rejection
manifested in social exclusion - or in its most exacerbated form: violence - is thus,
ultimately, motivated by a profound fear of failure or even of destruction, (of a veritable
Goetterdaemmerung, so to speak). The novel furthermore captures this looming doom in
the frequent pictorial references to the setting sun, a powerful image for the degenerate
state of the nation.3 The reference to boundaries in Ahmed’s quote recalls recent
expansions of the notion of the boundary or border as largely symbolic. According to
Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, for example, “what remains distinctive about
locality and community … is their (people’s) sense of difference and distinctiveness.
Community difference and identity … reside ... in the minds of the people who express
them” (Donnan/ Wilson, 1999: 24; my italics). In other words, the perceived difference
and ensuing identity formation is constructed, imagined and hence symbolic. However,
for all its symbolism and mental fabrication, for the marginalized characters in A Distant
Shore, these symbolic boundaries are no less real for not being physically marked, since
they are clearly real in their consequences.
In the novel, Mr Anderson, “my benefactor” as Solomon comes to refer to him, is at
some pains to explain to Solomon what goes on in people’s minds: “There’s an awful lot
of you and the system’s already creaking to breaking point. I mean, things are particularly
bad if you want to get into one of our hospitals. People are upset…. People think … [t]hat
you have too many children… that you don’t really want to work. It’s in their heads and
it makes them mad” (289). To this helpless attempt at explaining prejudice Solomon
responds with a disarmingly wise innocence: “Who put it there?” (289). Even though Mr
Anderson and his wife prove to be guardian angels for Solomon, in this particular
exchange, Mr Anderson can’t seem to help himself but use the distancing device of the
plural ‘you’ when referring to Solomon and the implied masses of asylum seekers. In this
enumeration of the usual prejudices, the ones referring to the lack of hospital space and
the fear of being outnumbered are especially noteworthy as they both imply the threat of
extinction, personal as well as national. Yet again, this passage evokes the concept of the
imagined community, which needs to protect itself, its members and its space, against the
intrusion of others in order to secure its meer survival. The stranger is thus constructed as
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a figure of danger, who transgresses perceived boundaries and engenders fear in the
‘native’. As a result, the enforcement of violence becomes ‘justified’. Following Sara
Ahmed, the discourse of stranger danger becomes a “mechanism for the justification of
acts of violence against those who are already recognized as strangers” (2000: 37). This
justification applies with special force to the vindication/ defense of Solomon’s
murderers offered by the owner of the pub in the scene discussed above. (In keeping
with the colonial reading previously suggested, Weston/ Britain is thus constructed as the
center from which other beings - that is marginalized, strange bodies - have to be
expelled as they constitute a threat to identity and home.)
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It is only shortly after setting foot on English soil that Solomon becomes acquainted
with the dynamic of stranger danger when he is accused of the rape of a young white
English girl. If according to studies on civil violence the ultimate violent strangers are
figured as either immigrants or men of color (Ahmed, 2000: 36) with cultural difference
as the prime source responsible for the fear of crime, this allegation against an individual
that is doubly stigmatized is not surprising. The case is, however, further complicated by
the fact that the alleged victim is still almost a child. Again following Sara Ahmed, “the
discourse of stranger danger also involves the figuring … of the vulnerable body, the one
who is most at risk. Here, ‘the child’ becomes a figure of vulnerability, the purified body
that is most endangered by the contaminating desires of strangers” (2000: 34). Based on
this explanation, the episode begs to be read as an allegory. Keeping in mind the
traditional identification of the land/ country/ nation with the female body, it is not only
the innocence and virginity of a girl child that is at risk from the proximity of strangers
but it is the moral purity of nation space itself that is under attack, that is violated by the
uncontained sexual desires attributed to the black man.
The ‘strange encounter’ that receives most of the attention in the novel is undoubtedly
the relationship between Dorothy and Solomon. With its reversed chronology the novel
very cautiously develops this budding relationship between two people who “do not fit”
(Ahmed, 2000: 24), whose common bond is chiefly based on the mutual recognition of
their loneliness and their shared inability to deal with painful memories. What draws
these two individuals together is thus their common experience of alienation and
‘strangerness’ (Ahmed, 2000: 88) which results in the creation of what Sara Ahmed calls
a ‘community of strangers’ (2000: 84), a common bond with another person who has
shared a similar experience of (dis)-placement – be it physically or psychologically. It is
however not only with Dorothy that Solomon shares a common bond. When considering
the cast of characters he encounters in Britain, in fact, almost every person who does him
a good turn is strictly speaking a stranger and as such a member of the community of
strangers. It is thus not surprising that Solomon strikes up a friendship with Mike, his
“Good Samaritan” (293), who as an Irishman is himself a stranger in England. Even Mr
and Mrs Anderson are not ‘fully’ English for they retire to Scotland, the place where
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Mum is originally from. As Solomon’s “sole desire was to be safe in England” (279), it is
these ‘other’ strangers, who provide him with a feeling of safety. (In his first encounter
with Mum Solomon significantly realizes that “there was something about this small
elderly woman that made me feel safe” (277).) Caryl Phillips seems to have deliberately
constructed a palette of characters that are not English but different in their own ways in
order to show how a similarly marginalized position in society promotes a deeper
understanding and sympathy for the plight of another stranger.
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A further characteristic that draws Solomon and Dorothy toward each other is their
common obsession with decorum and manners. In A Distant Shore, the English are
frequently portrayed as rude, uncivilized and ill-mannered - or at least perceived as such
by the novel’s two protagonists whereas they both appreciate the polite behaviour in each
other. This need for courtesy and respectability seems at once to compensate for their
estrangement from their surroundings and to provide them with a sense of dignity and
self-esteem. This insistence on manners also serves to further emphasize how remote
their fellow-citizens are from anything like civilized or simply human behaviour.4
Dorothy significantly says towards the end of the novel: “after all, without manners we’re
no better than animals” (311). As in many of Caryl Phillips’s other narratives, this need
for respectability goes together with an impeccable use of the English language.
Solomon’s refined diction in particular recalls several other black male characters in
Phillips’s previous work, especially Cambridge in the eponymous novel, Rudi in On
Higher Ground, and Othello in The Nature of Blood. For Phillips, proper use of language
and personal refinement appear to be inextricably linked as a sign of the degree to which
a person is civilized. He makes this very clear when in an interview he declares that,
“Language is vital and precious. It dignifies us” (Turner, 2003: 3). Similar to the
characters mentioned above it appears that in terms of manners and eloquence Solomon
finds himself on a reversed civilizing mission. This reversal becomes especially evident
when after already having received several items of hate mail one day dog mess is
introduced through his letter-box. In response, Solomon summarizes such conduct as
“savage” (300), a term that applies even more forcefully to his later cowardly and brutal
murder. In short, as a further sign of illustrating the present condition of Britain, the
novel unveils the allegedly civilized nation as its exact opposite and in contrast represents
those who are commonly viewed as ‘savage’ as the ones who exhibit civilized behaviour.
It thus shows that those prejudices that are usually projected onto the unwanted ‘others’
are part of the nation’s own “mental condition” (292).
Ultimately, A Distant Shore is another clear testimony to the author’s political agenda
of letting the subaltern speak. In an article written for The Guardian entitled “The
Silenced Minority” on the power of the far-right in Flanders he says: “Mr Phillips’s
multicultural society works only if there is a reciprocal exchange and, hopefully one day,
a commingling, of narratives. […] Having authority over our own story, and the means to
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tell it, is the most potent weapon that any of us are able to utilize against the corrupt
vision of the far right” (2004: 6-7). By taking on the task of the story-teller, giving
Solomon and Dorothy a voice, Phillips saves their stories - which are representative of so
many other ‘small’ lives - from oblivion. A Distant Shore can thus also be described as a
narrative of resurrection, talking from beyond the grave in Solomon’s case and from
beyond reason in Dorothy’s, setting a narrative monument in their memory.
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By way of conclusion, with its close scrutiny of today’s Britain the novel provides a
powerful commentary on the nation’s present condition by drawing a very bleak picture.
Equally do the fates of the novel’s two protagonists – death and mental collapse
respectively – provide little hope for Caryl Phillips’s vision of a functional multicultural
society. However, they have at least attempted what Sara Ahmed calls an ethical
communication which for her is about “a certain way of holding proximity and distance
together: one gets close enough to the others to be touched by that which cannot simply
be get across. In such an encounter, ‘one’ does not stay in place, or one does not safely
stay at a distance (there is no space which is not implicated in the encounter). It is
through getting closer rather than remaining at a distance, that the impossibility of pure
proximity can be put to work, or made to work” (2000: 157). Hence, the only glimpse of
hope for the future of the nation, its accommodation of change and its acceptance of
strangers can be detected in the portrayal of the delicate friendship formed between
Dorothy and Solomon, two vulnerable and - for the time being - sadly defeated
characters.
Yet, despite the tragic defeat suffered by his characters Phillips himself demonstrates
an undaunted determination to continue his fight against racism and nationalism – and on
this note of resolve I would like to conclude my paper – “as long as there remain people
who are incapable or unwilling to uncouple nationality from race, then my continued
presence has virtue in so far as it might serve to confound, or perhaps even, educate such
people” (Phillips, 2001: 304f.).
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Notes
1. All further page references are given in the text.
2. The use of the term ‘imagined’ in Dorothy’s comment yet again recalls Benedict
Anderson’s notion of the ‘imagined community’. He refers to the nation as “imagined
because in the mind of each member lives the image of their communion” (6). The
key terms ‘imagined’, ‘mind’ and ‘communion’ clearly capture a state of mind which
leads to a position of prejudice and of preconceptions of the other.
3. See for example: “As the sun began to set” (7), “the dying sun forms a halo around
his [Solomon’s] head” (32). The second quote can in addition be read as a bad omen
anticipating Solomon’s violent death.
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4. For example, Dorothy is not only annoyed at the hooligans and homeless but also
complains about ill manners in her pupils and her liaison Geoff or at her neighbour’s
banging on her door “for it suggests bad manners” (20) and at her piano student’s
sitting at the piano “without any sense of propriety” (21).
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References
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London
and New York: Routledge.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991,1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson. 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity , Nation
and State. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Ledent, Benedicte. 2004. “’Of, and not of, this Place’: Attachment and Detachment in
Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore” in Kunapipi 26 (1): 152-160.
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Morris, David J. and Karl Hess. 1975. Neighborhood Power: The New Localism. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Phillips, Caryl. 2001. A New World Order. Selected Essays. London: Secker & Warburg.
Phillips, Caryl. 2003. A Distant Shore. London: Vintage.
Phillips, Caryl. 2004. “The silenced minority” in The Guardian (Saturday, May 15): 1-7.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1216292,00.html
Turner, Nathaniel. 2003. “A Conversation with Caryl Phillips, author of the novel A
Distant Shore” in ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American
Themes (November 2003): 1-5. http://www.nathanielturner.com/distantshore2htm
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Africans, Immigrants and the question of Identity in Germany
Tomi Adeaga
Abstract
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In this paper, I seek to discuss my notion that the issue of identity is closely related to the
deeply entrenched xenophobic approach to people of colour which has always been prevalent
in Germany. For, how are people supposed to integrate culturally when they cannot move
professionally, economically or even geographically? Just over 50 years ago, the US supreme
court banished the "separate but equal" policies that segregated state schools here; it seems
Germany is embracing a dogmatic version of its antithesis - "united but unequal". There are
not many opportunities for people of colour and immigrants to fully integrate into the culture
and the economy. Those who try to protect their children by making them aware of their dual
origins are said to fail to get themselves integrated into the society. But what is happening is
that this new generation rejected by the country they call home need a sense of identity; a
sense of belonging. This paper centres on this is argument. I intend to make use of books like
Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt: Schwarze im Nationalsozialismus (Martin, Peter and
Christine Alonzo, eds., 2004), TheBlackBook, 2005) among others.
Introduction
Given that Germany was at the centre of the World War I and II, the allied forces from
The United Kingdom, France and later the United States of America also included Africans
from the French and British colonies as well as African Americans. According to Christian
Koller;
Insgesamt kämpften etwa 485000 “farbige” Soldaten aus den französischen
und 160000 aus den britischen Kolonien in Europa. Die größten Kontingente
kamen aus Algerien (173000 Mann), Indien (153000), Westafrika (134000),
Tunisien (60000), Indochina (7000) und Madagaskar (34000). Hinzu kamen
gegen Kriegsende zwei afroamerikanische US-Divisionen.1
[A total of about 485000 “coloured” soldiers from French and 160000 British
colonies fought in Europe. The biggest contingent came from Algeria (173000
Men), India (153000), West-Africa (134000), Tunisia (60000), Indochina
(7000) and Madagascar (34000). They were joined towards the end of the War
by two African-American US-divisions].
After the World War II, the National Socialists in Germany used these coloured soldiers’
presence for political propaganda. They protested openly against these “Barbarians” sent to
kill their people and destroy their country. The fact that African - American GIs as well as the
Africans in the various armies had relationships with German women was seen as a blow to
1
Christian Koller. „Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt“: Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von
Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914 – 1930), Stuttgart (Steiner)
2001, S. 87 – 96.
1
their aspirations for a pure German race. Subsequently, this is how, what has come to be
known as the Rheinlandbastarde (World War I) and Die Besatzungskinder or Occupation
Children (World War II) came about. These children mainly never knew their fathers and
grew up in foster homes. They were alienated from their African and African-American
origins. Thus they saw themselves as Germans with African origins. However, in a society
that in the past persecuted non-Aryans, accepting people of colour has been quite difficult.
Until the early 1970s, the German government looked for ways to give them up for adoption
in parts of Europe.
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These children were later joined by children born through relationships between African
students and German women who left after their studies because the German laws did not
allow them to stay on after their studies. Some of the students were even ignorant of their
children’s existence because they had to leave Germany after their studies. A number of them
were put in foster homes or grew up with their mothers, sometimes ignorant of their African
origins. The other also equally important group of people are North African immigrants in
Germany who were taken to Germany to work alongside other guest workers from parts of
Europe and Turkey to rebuild the shattered Germany economy after the World War II and
have since been made their homes there.
I seek to look at the cultural aspect, which has always been a stumbling block for the
immigrants, who are unable to be fully integrated into the German cultural traditions. I am
specifically looking at the Afro-Germans and the second generation immigrants whom unlike
their parents have lived all their lives in Germany and consider themselves German citizens
but the government and the society perceive them as outsiders who will go back to their
countries of origin, taking their bags of problems with them.
Consequently, the first task in any discussion is to get the scale of the immigration issue in
perspective:
Immigration has been increasing in the last decade, but its scale is still far
smaller than the peak of international migration - in the late 19th century when some 17% of Europe's working population moved to the New World,
mainly to the United States, where 30% of the population was foreign-born by
1910. Immigration into the EU has averaged around 1.4 million each year,
compared with some 2.3 million into the United States. And about 5.3% of
Europeans are foreign-born, compared with 10.3% in the United States, and
nearly 25% in Australia. What has changed is the spread of countries around
the world from which migration now occurs, with Africa and Asia replacing
Europe as the main source of immigrants. More people have also entered
Europe as asylum seekers in recent years, accounting for around one-third of
immigrants - although it has declined sharply from its peak during the Bosnian
and Kosovo crises. But more immigrants are also coming as high-skilled
workers to take temporary jobs in areas of shortage, such as teaching, nursing,
and high-tech computer jobs - and governments are encouraging that trend.”2
But the German government has been slow to embrace this trend. People of African
origins make up a small number of these immigrants in Germany. But unlike the older, first
2
Schifferes, Steven. Analysis: Who gains from immigration? Monday, 17 June, 2002
2
generation of immigrants who knew their origins, the second generation had to search for
their origins. Subsequently, the issue of identity is a topic that is hard to define in Germany.
This type of identity is what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has rightly called
modern identity. According to him, “modern identity is inherently political, because it
demands recognition. The idea that modern politics is based on the principle of universal
recognition comes from Hegel. Increasingly, however, it appears that universal recognition
based on a shared individual humanity is not enough, particularly on the part of groups that
have been discriminated against in the past. Hence modern identity politics revolves around
demands for recognition of group identities—that is, public affirmations of the equal dignity
of formerly marginalised groups.”3
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In contrast to the United States, and even countries like France and Great Britain with
colonial histories, Germany never saw itself as a melting pot of cultures. Migration was
supposed to be useful to meet the need for labor during the economic boom years in West
Germany. This goal was at least in line with the plans most immigrants, especially the
students made when they came to Germany. Most of them believed they would return to their
home countries after a few years of working abroad, and settle down there to put what they
had learnt in practice. They dreamed of playing active parts in the construction of their
countries in the post-independent era. Subsequently, this first generation African immigrant
workers and students knew their roots and were not in search of their identities. They had
their cultural traditions that remained a vital part of their lives. These cultural traditions were
kept alive through their interactions with their fellow country men. Those of them who stayed
on in Germany for various reasons had a lot of socio-political problems to deal with.
The “German society, on the one hand, drew a strict bureaucratic and often humiliating
line between the German citizen and the so-called foreigners -- a term which is at least
misleading for the younger generation. And, of course, children of legal immigrants in
Germany still do not receive German citizenship automatically.”4
This so-called order, established in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s, was not
challenged until the civil youth movement of 1968 protested against it in West Germany. The
1968 movement voiced strong criticism of social conventions. It showed that there was a need
for the German society to relax its rules and embrace the changes taking place in their
societies. It also had its effect on the immigrant children who were by then German citizens.
Born and raised in the country, these children developed a growing and critical awareness of
their social status, which was often described in traditional leftist terms as exploitation and
class conflict. In the course of time, intercultural societies were founded, aimed at raising the
consciousness and improving the social opportunities of immigrants. The activities ranged
from cooking and language classes to feminist groups and political action committees. For
many young immigrants, these clubs and societies opened doors into modern West German
society for them. They saw it as an opportunity for personal development, and they made
friends with people from other cultural backgrounds. “They created their own lives apart from
3
Fukuyama, Francis. Identity and migration. Prospect Magazine. Issue 131 , February 2007. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=8239 – accessed 08.04.2007
4
Barbara Weber. Immigration and Politics in Germany. Journal of the International Institute. University of
Michigan. www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol2no3/ozdemir.html - 27k - accessed – 08.04.2007
3
the often very strict and old-fashioned ideas of their parents, who often stuck to philosophies
and ideas which in the meantime had become obsolete even in their home countries.”5
This search for identity starts quite early as has been illustrated in a book entitled Sichtbar
anders - Aus dem Leben Afrodeutscher Kinder und Jugendlicher edited by Eva Massingue, a
mother of an Afro-German child.6 In this book, the youths interviewed express their everyday
fight to be visible because the xenophobic thoughts have so much been part of the German
culture that they see nothing wrong in their actions. These children interviewed at different
times give the impression of being lost and are in search of a place to belong. Children from
single mothers were more affected than those whose parents are living together and are able to
raise their children in both cultures. But even then, these children still feel the need to create
spaces for themselves, with which they can identify. They are in search of a sense of
belonging, a place where they will not have to ask to be loved. Such children are often
surprised when they go to visit their African relations and are confronted with completely
different cultures which often openly accept them as their own.
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Subsequently, these children grow up fighting for their rights to be called Germans and be
accepted as an integral part of the society. They meet in small numbers and work together to
create spaces for themselves. Communities like the Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (ISD), the
feminist group, ADEFRA and many more have made major contributions towards raising
more awareness for their plight and need to be visible members of their societies.
Theirs is indeed a complex situation because they are not at home in Germany and they
are constantly confronted with this even by the German government. The former German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl said during his time in office, that Germany was not an immigration
country. Hartwig Pautz, observes that the notion that, “Germany is not a country of
immigration’ is a fiction of national homogeneity that came under increased pressure with the
advent, in 1998, of a centre-left government. New laws for immigration, integration and
citizenship were to be introduced, eradicating the concept of Volk tied together by ius
sanguinis. But the opposition Christian Democratic Union made an electoral issue of
‘Ausländerpolitik’, especially integration, accusing the government of jeopardising ‘German
cultural identity’. What ensued was the Leitkulturdebatte, about Germany’s predominant
culture, characterised by the notion of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the incompatibility of
‘different’ cultures. This not only replaced racial belonging with cultural belonging,
transforming the ius sanguinis into an equally essentialist ius cultures, it also formed part of a
conservative attempt to re-establish a ‘normal’ German national consciousness, cleared of the
memory of the Holocaust.7
A few years ago, “Germany's Christian Democrats gingerly floated the idea of
Leitkultur—the notion that German citizenship entails certain obligations to observe standards
of tolerance and equal respect. The term Leitkultur—which can be translated as a "guiding" or
"reference culture"—was invented in 1998 by Bassam Tibi, a German academic of Syrian
5
Ibid.
Massingue, Eva. Sichtbar Anders – Aus dem Leben Afrodeutscher Kinder und Jugendlicher. Verband
binationaler Familien und Partnerschaften, iaf (Hg.) Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel, 2005
7
Hartwig Pautz. The politics of identity in Germany: the Leitkultur debate. Race & Class, Vol. 46, No. 4, 39-52
(2005) DOI: 10.1177/0306396805052517. © 2005 Institute of Race Relations
6
4
origin, precisely as a non-ethnic, universalist conception of citizenship that would open up
national identity to non-ethnic Germans. Despite these origins, the idea was immediately
denounced by the left as racist and a throwback to Germany's unhappy past, and the Christian
Democrats quickly distanced themselves from it. But in the past few years, even Germany has
had a much more robust public debate about national identity and mass immigration..”8 In a
report written by the Council of Europe, it said that "Racist and anti-Semitic violence is one
of the most pressing and dangerous expressions of racism and intolerance in Germany… open
and latent racism and anti-Semitism existing more generally within some segments of German
society, and a general apathetic attitude towards such phenomena."9 This does not give room
to the growth of an identity either as a German national. It is true that there have been an
Afro-German consciousness that includes all Africans and people of African descent in the
last three decades in Germany, but it is not know to most Germans as a collective voice of a
minority group trying to make itself heard in Germany.
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However, this problem of conservatism and the need to preserve national identity against
outside influence in not only peculiar to Germany but instead it is a problem commonly found
in other parts of Europe and the rest of the world:
The formative experience for contemporary European political consciousness
is the two world wars, which Europeans tend to blame on nationalism. Yet
Europe's old national identities continue to linger. People still have a strong
sense of what it means to be British or French or Dutch or Italian, even if it is
not politically correct to affirm these identities too strongly. And national
identities in Europe, compared to those in the Americas, remain more
ethnically based. So while all European countries have the same commitment
to formal, political citizenship equality as the US, it is harder to turn that into
felt equality of citizenship because of the continuing force of ethnic
allegiance. The Dutch, for example, are famous for their pluralism and
tolerance. Yet in the privacy of their own homes, the Dutch remain quite
socially conservative. Dutch society has been multicultural without being
assimilative, something that fits well into a consociational society that was
traditionally organised into separate Protestant, Catholic and socialist
"pillars." Similarly, most other European countries tend to conceive of
multiculturalism as a framework for the coexistence of separate cultures rather
than a transitional mechanism for integrating newcomers into a dominant
culture (what Amartya Sen has called "plural monoculturalism").10
In most of the cases, multiculturalism has meant separatism und stigmatisation for those
immigrants. This has not given room for any form of integration. Why is it so in Germany?
There are many reasons for it. One key factor is the fact that their bound to ethnic definition.
This bound was not introduced by the National Socialist Regime; instead, it was already a part
of their social perceptions. “Unlike, say, the French, who acknowledge that their culture and
language derive from the Romans and that they are akin to other Latin peoples, the Germans
8
Fukuyama, Francis. Identity and migration. Prospect Magazine. Issue 131 , February 2007. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=8239 – accessed 08.04.2007
9
Germany rapped for racist violence. 3 July, 2001
10
Fukuyama, Francis. Identity and migration. Prospect Magazine. Issue 131 , February 2007. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=8239 – accessed 08.04.2007
5
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see themselves as unique. In the words of philosopher Johann Fichte, they are an Urvolk -- an
archetypal people. That makes for an inflexible -- almost tribal -- sense of identity.”11 This
makes them an ethnic bound people. “Even after World War II, when West Germans did
everything in their power to rid their culture of chauvinism and racism, they left intact a
citizenship law that was based on blood kinship rather than on place of birth. That meant that
the children of Turkish guest workers, born in Germany, were not automatic citizens, yet an
ethnic German from Romania whose family had never resided in contemporary Germany
was.”12 This explains the lack of sense of integration among people of African descent that
make up less than 5% of the German population. They have no sense of belonging because of
the rules in place and the long entrenched schizophrenia against them and their skin colour.
“It wasn’t until 2000 that a more open citizenship law took effect. In arguing for a territorybased notion of citizenship, then-Interior Minister Otto Schily proclaimed that Germany
needed to rise above “the destructive principle of ethnocracy.” Six years on, Germans are only
beginning to differentiate between their ethnic and civic identities. Ethnic Germans still tend
to look on nonethnic Germans as auslander, or foreigners. Even the media, when they
acknowledge minorities as German citizens, use tortured phrases, describing someone as a
“Turk who carries a German passport,” for example. Not surprisingly, such marginalization
has negative consequences.”13 These negative notions overshadow the fact that these nonwhite Germans are a vital part of the German societies because they pay their taxes and make
major contributions to the German economy.
To conclude, the issue of identity among people of African descent and other ethnic
minorities in Germany will continue to be an issue because of the lack of adequate provisions
made by the government to fully integrate them into their societies. There is no doubt that
there are integration offices scattered over the country but not all minority groups are well
represented. Apart from that, there is not much coordinated information on their activities.
The German public is also not always aware of their efforts as representatives of the ethnic
minorities in Germany. What happens is the small immigrant communities often tend to
depend on themselves to resolve their problems or makes themselves heard. But as experience
has shown, it is highly difficult to break down the walls of cultural conservatism that have
surrounded the Germans over centuries. Their strong sense of superiority supersedes the
socio-geographical changes that have taken place in Europe whose the map needs to be
redrawn to accommodate these immigrants. Ignoring their plight does not mean that they will
go away overnight.
11
http://www.cantonrep.com accessed – 08.04.07
Gregory Rodriguez. "Germans stick to the ethnic definition more than any other European nation" Special to
the Los Angeles Times. CantonRep.com. 06.06.06
13
Gregory Rodriguez. "Germans stick to the ethnic definition more than any other European nation"
Special to the Los Angeles Times. CantonRep.com. accessed: 06.06.06
12
6
Bibilography
Fukuyama, Francis. Identity and migration. Prospect Magazine. Issue 131 , February 2007.
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=8239 – accessed 08.04.2007
Germany rapped for racist violence. 3 July, 2001
Koller, Christian. „Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt“: Die Diskussion um die
Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und
Militärpolitik (1914 – 1930), Stuttgart (Steiner) 2001, S. 87 – 96
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Pautz, Hartwig. The politics of identity in Germany: the Leitkultur debate. Race & Class, Vol.
46, No. 4, 39-52 (2005) DOI: 10.1177/0306396805052517. © 2005 Institute of Race
Relations
Martin, Peter and Christine Alonzo (Hg.) Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt: Schwarze im
Nationalsozialismus. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 2004.
Massingue, Eva. Sichtbar Anders – Aus dem Leben Afrodeutscher Kinder und Jugendlicher.
Verband binationaler Familien und Partnerschaften, iaf (Hg.) Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel,
2005.
Rodriguez, Gregory. "Germans stick to the ethnic definition more than any other European
nation" Special to the Los Angeles Times. CantonRep.com. 06.06.06
Schifferes, Steven. Analysis: Who gains from immigration? Monday, 17 June, 2002
Weber, Barbara. Immigration and Politics in Germany. Journal of the International Institute.
University of Michigan. www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol2no3/ozdemir.html - 27k accessed – 08.04.2007
7
The Road to Nicosia: Fragments, Quotations, Potholes
Louise Saldanha and Aruna Srivastava
•
•
•
•
•
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On the space of the borderland: At some point on our way to a new consciousness, we will
have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow
healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle
eyes. (Gloria Anzaldúa)
On the space of diaspora: Resistance lies in self-conscious engagement with dominant,
normative discourses and representations and in the active creation of oppositional and
analytical cultural spaces. (Chandra Mohanty)
On the space of home: home is no longer just one place. It is locations.(bell hooks)
On the space of the postcolonial: The colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between
its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulations as repetition and
difference. (Homi Bhabha)
On the space of the Sacred: Because within the archaeologies of dominance resides the will
to divide and separate. . . [there are]reciprocal investments we must make to cross over into a
metaphysics of interdependence. . . Pedagogies that are derived from the Crossing . . . disturb
and reassemble the inherited divides of Sacred and secular, the embodied and the
disembodied, for instance, pushing us to take seriously the dimensions of spiritual labour that
make the sacred and the disembodied palpably tangible and, therefore, constitutive of the
lived experience of millions of women and men in different parts of the world. (Jacqui
Alexander)
Fragments from a performance-in-progress:
•
In order to get there, we want to move through a series of sites here. As moments, they are
discrete, incommensurable, colliding, and disparate, but they are, at the same time, all part of
the same moment. In doing so, our hope is that, in the fissures and gaps existing betwixt and
between these tellings, some possibilities, and limits of border crossings might take shape.
[this avoids the whole problem, of “flow”—which, as you read this, you may find to be an
issue. As my students tell me, “all the connections are there but in my head”! Anyway, I
suspect that some of the bumpiness will be smoothed over by our difference voices]
•
At the site of the border dividing here from there, near from far, home from away, outside
from inside, there are always many more sides than “both.” Dictionarilly defined, “borders”
find meaning as “that which forms the outer edge of something,” as “lines or frontier areas
separating political divisions or geographic regions or parts,” as “decorative strips around the
edge of something, such as fabric,” and, finally, as “strips of ground, as at the edge of a
garden or walk, in which ornamental plants or shrubs are planted.” The definitions here
obscuring the relations of labour, of gender, of race, of culture, of nation enabling these
borders—be they political, geographical, or ornamental—to appear in the first place. That
tending of plants and shrubs of the last definition perhaps being the work Bush said, last year,
Americans won’t do so poignantly (in)articulated in the news which is too full of the number
of people dying in motion crossing borders from Mexico into the US, from Aboriginal
reserves into Canadian urban centres. And, all this in times where efforts of worldwide
flexible accumulation of capital endeavour to signify borders of little matter at all.
•
•
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•
•
The world may indeed be a smaller place, where the movement of capital and bodies occurs
at rates once perhaps unimaginable. But, increased and diversified practices and processes of
segregation ensure this proximity does not necessarily equate to familiarity and equity.
Globalising operations bind destinations to points of origins through foreign policies and
labour restructuring. Migrations do not just happen. They are produced, and they are
structured. “Diasporic,” “immigrant,” “minority,” “ethnic,” “multicultural” performatively
utter not just the Other, but the Self as well. While, ostensibly, the goal is to be, at home
here, the interpellations hailing us return us always to that point of arrival. For, to be really
at home dreams us no longer requiring Western “hospitalities” and the power relations it
entails between hosts and guests, inhabitants and visitors that keep us, necessarily, in our
place, out of place, not of this place.
And so, perhaps, back to here, a tale also unravelling in the telling: In contemporary
evocations of contact zones, borderlands, margins, peripheries, academic poststructural
imaginaries, importantly and critically, need be always burdened as well with the material
work of borders as they unevenly divide mobility, control, and agency. For, from where is it
that border crossings are free? From where is it that they do not cost money or time? From
where is it that are they safe? From where is it that their dangers can be fetishised? From
where is it that they become oppositional and transgressive? From where is it that they can
be free ranging? From where is it that they are seen to be in crisis? From where is it that
they have two sides? From where is it that they are metaphor?
I think of something Rinaldo has written, the importance of a “practice of care” and how our
push for community and identity, comfort and like-mindedness, a kind of border-policing
that marked the underside of our social justice efforts in the 80s and 90s (even now)
undermined that practice of care, across difference, perceived difference, constructed
difference (because we knew these were constructed). What are the ethics we bring to bear
on the need for comfort, community, tradition, friendship, solidarity, the demands of
coalition building (by nature built on difference, across boundaries), the sincere and
thoughtful request of the other for a hand across the bridge, a bridge that is stolid and
immovable now, may be ephemeral, disappear, break down, tear away, in another context?
What are the ethics of suspicion in a practice of care?
I am drawn in and harshly critical at once, find myself thinking about the United States and
guns as a north of the border and very holy Canadian, pondering the vicissitudes of naming
(Cho first or last, as he preferred to call himself or as is “correct”?), bristling academically at
the simplistic attribution of autobiography to artistic creation, horrified by the perpetuation of
inaccuracy, the wilfulness of misreading and unmemory, moved to tears by stories of
professorial heroism, to rage by stories of childhood racism, to puzzlement and
understanding at student and university inaction, to further research about SSRIs and
depression, and mental illness as motive, to Michael Moore, to reflections on adolescent
bravado in a digital age, and on memories of so many silences and shuttered faces in my
classrooms, where neither students nor teacher traversed a middle ground of connection or
community at all. It isn’t my job. And then, a man goes mad, or berserk, or whatever
narrative makes sense to us afterwards, kills many many human souls, eye to eye, and, what?
“we are the Hokie Nation”. What were they and we before those moments of shooting? I feel
perilous, defiant, and wonder, during all of these years of Dec. 6 memorials why I have not
given the same kind of thought to Marc Lepine and to the feminist politics of what we are
doing as I have to Seung-Hui Cho, Nikki Giovanni, George Bush, Facebook, IanMcFarlane,
CBC, CNN, Wikipedia, and numerous blogs in the last many days. In this event, as with
9/11, something of its implications, something of its complexity and porousness is more
evident to me. Or perhaps, I am simply infected with so much work on crossing, on what
Jacqui Alexander calls the “metaphysics of independence” or the “tensions of
intersubjectivity”:
We are all inhabitants of this world. The question we must pose is how do we inhabit this
new world order. The processes…constitute and ensemble. We all have a relationship to
them although we are not similarly positioned within them. Yet we are all implicated in
them. How do we contest these contradictions, even as we live and reproduce them, we
who are neither its creators nor its passive inheritors?. . . There are no innocent spaces;
thus all spaces are fraught with interests, both conflicting and contradictory. (Alexander
107-8)
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It is these “potholes”, the contradictions of embodiment, if you will, that mark, scar, and
enable the work that Louise and I have done together, and separately, over that past fifteen
years.
NOT OUR MOTHERS CHOLI1
Film, Identity and Transforming Borders
By Sharanpal Ruprai and Lisha Hassanali
“…we learn identities by watching films and imbibing the social and political
statements imbedded in their visual narratives; the films themselves act as
metaphorical mirror after which we pattern ourselves.”
- Rahul Gairola
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We will examine how womens bodies are represented in film and how these
roles reflect their place in society as well as their struggle to claim their own
identity. The following four films will serve as examples of the power that crossing
borders along geographical and gender lines can have on ones journey of selfacceptance regardless of societal norms.
Deepa Mehtas film Fire (1996) presents two women at the centre of a love story.
Their desire for each other crosses boundaries of gender and societal norms.
The two meet as daughters-in-law living in a joint family both in unfulfilling
marriages Sita, the newlywed, and Radha, the elder and barren sister-in-law.
The storyline challenged both domestic Indian and international audiences not
accustomed to seeing same sex relations on screen or kissing for that matter.2
When Fire was released in India, it was criticized as blasphemy and theatres
where it was playing were firebombed
Gadar (2001) is an epic romance set in Punjab, against the backdrop of the 1947
partition of India. Tara Singh is a truck driver who comes to the aid of a young
Muslim woman, Sakina when shes separated from her family during an attack
while crossing towards the new border of Pakistan. Director Anil Sharma, has
created a complex film that successfully bridges the political divide into a story of
two individuals falling in love despite their religious differences and warring
factions.
Bend it like Beckham (2002) by Gurinder Chadha is a coming of age film set in a
contemporary setting in London, England. Jesminder (Jess) is girl who would
rather play football (or soccer) than become proper young mother wishes her to
Choli - a short-sleeved blouse or bodice, often exposing part of the midriff, worn by
women in India.
2
It is uncommon for Indian cinema and Bollywood to depict physical affection such as
kissing or sexual relations. Nudity is also censored. Even now in 2007 top actresses, like
Aishwariya Rai decline Hollywood roles because of sexual content for fear of
repercussions form their Indian fans.
1
be. Jess sees own identity as one apart from parents background. Her best
friend is young white Briton and the young man she desires is her coach and hes
Irish. Bend it like Beckham was a huge mainstream hit in the UK both for its
portrayal of South Asians and its soundtrack. It also crossed to please North
American audiences the following year.
Lajja (2002) was released the same year as Chadhas film but was geared
towards a Bollywood audience in India. Director Rajkumar Santoshi used the
goddess Sitas trial by fire allegory to represent the struggle of women in
contemporary Indian society. We see the film through Vaidehis eyes as she
escapes her Indo-American selfish husband for her native India and encounters
the faces of female oppression while on her journey to free herself and her
unborn child. Santoshi was able to secure high profile actors and actresses to
create a message film that was entertaining, honest and heartbreaking.
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Theses films display how crossing border lines, aids South Asian women in their
pursuit for power, desire and sexuality. When they cross these geographical
borders what occurs is a realization of their bodies in performance. For example,
when Vaidehi, in Lajja, comes to the realization that she is pregnant her body
becomes the site of power. She does not to go back to America, but rather she
treks deeper into India only to find women who are able to aid her in her quest for
freedom. In Gadar, the lovers cross the border between Pakistan and India in
order to further their pursuit of desire for each other. When Sakina realizes that
her Muslim family will not accept her has a Sikh she crosses the boarder in order
to maintain her identity and desire for her Sikh husband. In Fire, the two women
cannot remain in their homes and share their love. They choose love over
societal and family acceptance. And finally in bend it like Beckham, Jess does
confess to her family her true self she leaves to pursue her dreams, which cannot
be realized at home. The change is accepted and the family adjusts, this
definitely the happiest ending of the four films presented. Why does movement
across deepen ones identity and provide an opportunity for change. Its as if the
border acts as a curtain through which women can shed the cultural constraints
that bind them.
A common thread in all four of the above films is that of borders. The borders
exist in the physical, that of geography; the spatial, that of society and culture;
and the personal; that of sexuality and gender. The lines drawn by others are
ones in which the women must cross to achieve autonomy. However, the
endings of each of the stories cited find the women in exile to achieve their goals
of freedom. While these films have been significant forces of storytelling and
cinematic achievement in the last decade its the impact on culture that will truly
manifest change. If cinema is indeed a reflection of society then what happens
next in how global society deals with the movement of women in exile in their
own cultures will determine the next wave in film narratives.
Migrancy, Remixed: Bodies Beside(s) Themselves
Proma Tagore
This paper begins with the thought that to be interpellated by migrancy – or to be unhoused from
the borders of the nation-state more generally – is also to be unhoused from the social spaces of the body.
For, migration does not simply involve the act of a body moving from one place to another; rather,
bodies, themselves, are produced, invented and reinvented in and through the act of migration. We might
think of migrant bodies as remixed: simultaneously deconstructed and rebuilt, made up of bodies
beside(s) and other than/to themselves. What, then, can migrancy tell us about the socially embodied
spaces of race, gender, sexuality and desire? In her recent essay, "Orientations: Toward a Queer
Phenemonology," cultural critic Sara Ahmed asks: "What does it mean to be oriented? How is that we
come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn? … What
does it mean for sexuality to be lived as oriented? What difference does it make what or who we are
oriented toward in the very direction of our desire?" In response, Ahmed suggests that "[i]f orientation is
a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence, of how we
inhabit spaces, and who or what we inhabit spaces with" (543). Ahmed's proposal leads me to a number
PI/CB of associated queries. If sexuality is, indeed, about the spaces and places we might reside in or inhabit,
169 then how does migrancy (re)figure desire? Is there something already queer about the migrant body?
What shapes or forms might the migrant or diasporic queer body take up, inhabit and be inhabited by?
'the asymmetrical geography of my heart': Anurima Banerji's Night Artillery
The 'asymmetrical geographies' of Night Artillery (TSAR Press, 2000), a first book of poetry by
the South Asian Canadian poet and performer, Anurima Banerji, may be viewed as precisely such an
exploration around the contours and textures of queer diasporic desire. As a queer writer of colour,
Banerji works to push and recreate language beyond the confines of colonial, patriarchal, heterosexist and
nationalist traditions, and she does so in order to open up possibilities for imagining a queer diasporic
poetics of the erotic. Night Artillery sketches out both cultural and sexual geographies of queer South
Asian bodies and desires as they have been reconfigured in the diaspora, and maps out a hybrid ‘genre’ or
poetics in which these bodies might be written. The hybridized body of this text – that is, the way it
resists assimilation into hegemonic definitions of what it means to be either ‘queer’, ‘South Asian’,
‘Canadian’, or ‘diasporic’, especially as these categories continue to be imagined as constituting coherent
and mutually exclusive subject positionings – could account for why Banerji’s poetry remains neglected
within contemporary literary criticism. My reading of Night Artillery hopes to examine, then, some of the
ways in which Banerji’s work helps us to (re)imagine written and embodied forms that queer diasporic
desire might specifically assume.
I argue that Night Artillery’s creative and intellectual trajectories address queer diasporic
subjectivities and attendant structures of queer racialised desire, the details of which have only recently
begun to be recognised within contemporary literary and academic discourse. Despite the fact that
throughout colonial history, the regulation of sexuality has played a crucial role in maintaining racist and
nationalist ideologies (just as the regulation of racial bodies has often upheld dominant sexual and gender
regimes)1, scholarship that engages the complexities of how institutions such as colonialism, nationalism
and heterosexism interlock in intricate and socially-specific ways is still rare. More recently, however, a
growing body of interdisciplinary research by and/or centering on queers of colour insists on the value of
“a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other
modes of difference” (Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz 1). To this extent, the work of critics such as José
Esteban Muñoz, Roberto Strongman, Gayatri Gopinath, David L. Eng, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin
Manalansan has challenged the white gay and lesbian movement’s deployment of developmental
discourses that centre around Euro-American norms and standards, while also questioning assumptions
about the postcolonial nation’s necessary heterosexism. In the context of such scholarship, work on
‘queer diasporas’ is one site where such intersectional investigations can take place.2
Banerji’s Night Artillery is part of this larger body of work by queers of colour in that it
endeavours to investigate forms that queer diasporic subjectivity might take, expressly in terms of the
South Asian diaspora, and amidst the topography of Canadian cultural production. In relation to these
specificities, Banerji’s work mirrors Jasbir K. Puar’s provocative and insightful question: “How
could/should one ‘queer’ the diaspora(s) or ‘diasporicize’ the queer?” (406). Night Artillery could also be
read in light Gayatri Gopinath’s recent book-length study, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and
South Asian Public Cultures. In this book, Gopinath argues that “if ‘diaspora’ needs ‘queerness’ in order
to rescue it from its genealogical implications, ‘queerness’ also needs ‘diaspora’ in order to make it more
supple in relation to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization” (11). An examination
of a wide range of South Asian cultural texts (including the work of well-known Canadian authors Shani
Mootoo and Shyam Selvadurai), Gopinath’s book makes the assertion that queer diasporic expressive arts
open up new possibilities for imagining collectivity, especially for those subjects who find themselves
invisibilised or rendered ‘impossible’ within different national spaces. My reading of Banerji’s poetry
hopes to further illuminate the ways in which a specifically lesbian/femme South Asian diasporic poetics
may contribute to building language (and new possibilities of language) for queer diasporic desires.
PI/CB
170
'this is no karma queen // brown sugar / exotic beauty': the sexualized grammar of race
As a Canadian queer writer of colour, Banerji finds herself speaking back to multiple and
interlocking axes of social power that situate her subjectivity – for example, heterosexism, patriarchy,
racism and colonialism, as well as different contexts of nationalism. For this reason, Banerji positions her
writing within an anti-colonial and anti-Orientalist poetics/politics, and draws attention to the gendered
and sexualised grammar of colonial constructions of race and the racialised body. In her poem, “Passage
to India,” she powerfully deconstructs the title of E.M. Forster’s famous novel and its typically colonial,
racist constructions of Indian masculinities, femininities, and sexualities. Her poem reveals the ways in
which these constructions continue to inform stereotypical ideas about the category of ‘South Asian
woman’ in a Eurocentric Canadian imaginary, and, thereby, to limit the positions and possibilities
available to such subjects within a present-day colonial and racist nation-state. “Passage to India” moves
through a plethora of such stereotypes, negating each with wit and alacrity. Ending with the lines, “no /
my vagina is not / the passage to india” (53), this poem stages a compelling talking-back to the
“heteropatriarchal” (Alexander 65) relations and assumptions that underlie Western colonialism and
racism, nationalistic constructions of cultural identity.
For example, “Passage to India” highlights colonial representations of South Asian women as
both brides and courtesans, at once the archetypal devoted wife and the exotic lover: "this is no arranged
marriage bride // no sandalwood-scented lover // exotic erotic kama sutra vulva / opening her divine legs /
mysterious oriential fantasy / come to life" (52-53). According to the colonial mythos, the South Asian
woman is coded through images of repression and asexuality, on the one hand, and deviant or excessive
sexuality and fantasy, on the other. Speaking of the ways in which such stereotypical constructions of the
South Asian woman haunt the Canadian nationalist imaginary, Himani Bannerji explains that “the
genealogies of these reified cultural identities which are mobilized in Canada are entirely colonial”; they
“perfectly tally” with earlier European Orientalist perceptions of Asia as essentially ‘traditional’ and
‘patriarchal’, in comparison to a ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ West (49). These constructions are thus not
only highly gendered and sexualised, but also classed and raced.3
JeeYeun Lee further elucidates how American Orientalist sexual and gender taxonomies –
especially the assumptions of whiteness that organize how differences are seen and understood – impact
on queers of colour and on queer Asian identities in particular. In her essay, “Why Suzie Wong Is Not a
Lesbian: Asian and Asian American Lesbian and Bisexual Women and Femme/Butch/Gender Identities,”
Lee describes a variety of other stereotypical images of ‘Asian-ness’ that Asian and South Asian queers
often negotiate: from the ‘model minority’ to the sexually passive ‘lotus blossom’ and the sexually
aggressive ‘dragon lady’ (118). Emphasising that such constructions must be viewed in relation to past
and present North American military and imperial interests in Asia, Lee points out that these
constructions also circulate in particular ways within mainstream North American gay and lesbian
communities. For example, binary understandings of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ continue to be operative
in North American queer publics, where this opposition serves to structure difference between white and
non-white queers. Based on interviews with Asian and South Asian queers, Lee’s article reveals that
‘whiteness’ often comes to signify both ‘progressive-ness’ and ‘queerness’ within such spaces, whereas
non-white queers are often read as ‘backwards’ and/or ‘heterosexual’. Lee’s interviewees thus speak of
their invisibilisation within queer spaces, as their gender and erotic identities are rendered unseen.4
'what genre can I write you into?': bodies and language, remixed
An engagement with Banerji’s Night Artillery must likewise grapple with the multiple and
interlocking systems of power that situate both the text and its readers’ subjectivities. However, an
important question that the book poses is: if dominant stereotypes and representations of race, gender,
sexuality and nation are clearly inadequate to one’s own understanding of self, body and desire, then what
are the specific forms, languages, traditions, images, and metaphors that a queer South Asian diasporic
PI/CB identity and poetics might claim? Indeed, "what genre can I write you into," asks the speaker of Banerji's
171 poem, "bending toward exile." In this paper, I argue that Banerji’s queer diasporic perspective provides
an important lens through which she is able to construct critically hybrid, or remixed, genealogies, and
thus unique poetic vocabularies, for expressing and situating queer racialised desire.
The deployment of a diasporic framework is certainly one of the ways in which Banerji works
toward fashioning her voice and aesthetics. As Gayatri Gopinath argues, practices of critical memory and
historicising are often distinctive to queer diasporic subjects: “Rather than evoking an imaginary
homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside of history, what is remembered through queer diasporic
desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contradictions and the violences of
multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles” (4). Similarly, Banerji’s challenge and complicate both
colonial and nationalist constructions of ‘home’, ‘homeland’, or ‘nation’ that rely on exclusionary,
territorial, or otherwise violent histories and practices, while simultaneously exploring the question of
how South Asian cultural identities may be refigured through a queer diasporic poetics.
The poem, “bending toward exile,” for example, reveals the complex and multiple ways in which
‘home’ is imagined and understood. In this way, the poem moves through multiple connotations and
metaphors of home, and sketches out the many different embodiments that ‘home’ might take within a
queer diasporic imaginary. This poem figures home, on the one hand, in terms of physical architectures
and concrete houses, as well as in terms of national homes and homelands. The concept of home is
related to structures of domesticity and also to ideas of origin. In the poem, home is both a site of
belonging and unbelonging: home is pictured as a protected racialised and cultural space, and at the same
time, homes, families and nations are posited as violent institutions. The poem draws on memoried,
forgotten and imagined homes. The body also becomes a home, just as home becomes the body. These
shifting meanings of home relate to Lee’s idea that “diasporic queers cannot inscribe themselves onto an
imagined or real homeland without radically changing its terms” (“Toward” 193). The poem, “bending
toward exile,” precisely “translat[es] house into flesh from mortar / and brick” (45) and then again into
the “immediate imposition of / poetry” (46). Multiple meanings of home are opened up, challenged,
figured and reconfigured. Each of these meanings cross over with others in order to reflect the multiple,
often uneven, relations that diasporic or migratory queer subjects have to institutions/concepts of home.
Just as the particular images of homes shift and migrate throughout “bending towards exile,” the
notion of home itself is redefined. The speaker seems to find her home, her sense of familiarity and
experience, in the living-out of multiform departures and exiles – or what Homi Bhabha describes as a
condition of “unhomeliness” (9). Departure, or the feeling of being unhoused, is in fact one of the most
powerful and persistent tropes of the entire collection, and it resonates in multiple ways throughout
Banerji’s poetry. In poems such as “bending toward exile” and “Shanti Jal,” we find images of departed
homes and countries, while “Air India, June 1985,” evokes and re-writes the loss of loved ones in the
context of historically-situated national disavowals. In pieces such as “Summer” and “Passage to India,”
tropes of departure are reformulated in order to address marginality within social systems, as well as
resistance or the refusal to conform to dominant social imperatives. In “Elegy for June,” departures of
memory, language and self are evoked. Still, in a substantial number of other poems, including “I Have
Your Body for Proof,” “Heart Murmurs” and “The Sound of a Heart Cracking,” it is the recurrent figure
of the departed or absent lover that structures yearning. While the precise images and meanings of both
desire and departure change and register differently in specific moments, the various figurations of love,
loss, belonging and longing also interleave, and help to define one another. For example, diasporic
longings and lesbian eroticism, while by no means identical, are also not imagined as wholly
incommensurate axes of desire. In the context of Night Artillery, these different figurations of desire
frequently, though sometimes surprisingly, slip into, intersect, or interrupt one another. For the queer
diasporic poet, these slippages mark, specifically, contiguous sites of language, experience and affect.
Banerji’s writing is thus important not only in its attempts to sketch out a queer diasporic poetics,
but also, more specifically, in its endeavour to develop a language of the erotic that centralises a queer,
South Asian diasporic identity, history, and politics. As queer South Asian desires and bodies (both
subcontinental and diasporic) are silenced and erased not only from dominant, heteropatriarchal forms of
PI/CB South Asian nationalisms, but also within white, mainstream North American gay and lesbian cultures,
172 our sexualities and erotic expressions, too, are frequently rendered unrecognisable and unintelligible. For
example, if sexuality and eroticism are understood as culturally- and historically-constructed, then it is
possible to understand why the various discourses around gender and sexual-orientation that help to
visibilise racially- and economically-privileged gay and lesbian cultures in North America may not
necessarily reflect, or be transferable onto, a variety of identities that do not organise themselves strictly
according to Euro-American sexual and gender binarisms. Further, the globalisation and imposition of
such terminology onto these non-normative sexual identities/practices often constitute, as Roberto
Strongman argues, a form of cultural imperialism that erases culturally-specific strategies of naming and
resistance for racially marginalised ‘queer’, or sexually dissident, identities (176). Thus, the very
languages that operate to visibilise (white) gay and lesbian desire and politics may equally function to
invisibilise queer racialised subjects from these discursive arenas.
The task of (re)claiming languages of queer racialised desire, however, continues to be a vexed
and complicated undertaking – one which is constantly mediated by colonial, neocolonial and nationalist
global economies. In the context of queer South Asian cultures, Ruth Vanita asks, for example, how we
can understand the various erasures around a whole range of discourses pertaining to non-normative
sexual and gender histories, as “colonialists and nationalists attempt to rewrite multivocal traditions into a
univocal, uniform tradition” (3). In Queering India, Vanita identifies the British colonial era, in particular
the nineteenth century, as a period when earlier South Asian homoeroticisms (and other eroticisms) are
replaced by modern Indo-European forms of homophobia, which draw from Victorian versions of JudaeoChristian discourse (3). During this time, a more regulated heteronormativity comes to pervade South
Asian cultures, for example, through the introduction of British anti-sodomy laws in India and the
increasing criminalisation of non-heteronormative sexual relations and practices; this rigid division of
culture along the lines of a homo/hetero sexual binary is once again taken up by later nationalist projects.5
Considering colonial, as well as nationalist, erasures and re-writings of heterogeneous South Asian sexual
histories, it becomes all the more pressing to re-envision these histories from a queer perspective.
Such re-envisioning, however, not only entails rediscovering or reclaiming alternative sexual
histories, but also developing new languages and frameworks with which to view both historical and
contemporary queer racialised identities. In resistance to the homogenising tendencies of both colonialist
and South Asian nationalist heteronormativities, as well as of a white Euro-American gay and lesbian
mainstream, South Asian queers, particularly in the diaspora, “have had to invent themselves,” as Nayan
Shah remarks, “often with new words and names of identification” (141). Paraphrasing the ideas of the
lesbian poet Suniti Namjoshi, Shah elaborates on how various contestations of language – including
translations, resignifications, and appropriations of language – have been crucial to constructing South
Asian queer identification, since “words have invented the world of South Asian queer affiliations and
social networks” (142). With similar purpose, the work of Banerji’s poetry is to create and craft new
erotic languages located in the specificities of queer South Asian diasporic experience.
In Night Artillery, we can see how such a queer South Asian diasporic poetics of the erotic is
assembled in the poems “Madhur,” “mulaqat,” “rati” and “Mashuqa.” In this set of poems, specifically
South Asian linguistic and cultural vocabularies of desire are at once evoked, queered, diasporicised and
reworked to build an aesthetic that is expressive of a diasporic South Asian lesbian/femme identity and
eroticism. the complex layering of distinct wells of experience and imagery, including diasporic longings
and sexual desire – serves to build a new, hybrid aesthetics of the erotic that is rooted in the specificities
of queer racialised desire, and in particular South Asian diasporic vocabularies. The titling of these
poems, for example, signals not just a reclamation, but also a remaking of the erotic languages of
particular South Asian cultural, poetic and performative traditions. As Banerji explains in her “Notes,”
the word “madhur” translates into English to mean “sweet”; the word “mulaqat” means “meeting”; “rati”
can describe “sexual love”; while “mashuqa” is a name for the feminine form of “the beloved” (58).
Drawing from a linguistic continuum that incorporates both Hindi/Sanskrit and Urdu/Persian terms,
Banerji exercises the multivocal meanings of these words: “madhur,” which describes a honeyed nectar or
sweet syrup, is also sometimes used as a term for linguistic eloquence; similarly, “mulaqat” is used both
PI/CB in terms of conversational, as well as sexual, intercourse or encounters.
In many ways, Banerji’s use of language in these poems can be related to the literary traditions of
173
Rekhta/Rekhti, the linguistic predecessor of modern Urdu, as well as other traditions of the ghazal.6
Meaning ‘mixed’, ‘poured-out’ or ‘scattered’, Rekhta emerged as the performative form of the colloquial
language common to Delhi/Lucknow during the eighteenth century; however, Rekhta fell out of use by
the end of the nineteenth century as the distinction between literary Urdu and Hindi became more rigid.
Rekhti is the feminine form of this verse; written in the language of women and often addressed to a
female beloved, Rekhti typically described, in an embellished or consciously performative manner,
women’s bodies and bodily functions, clothes and jewelry, conversations and quarrels, everyday domestic
situations between women, and female-female homoerotic relations.7 Although Rekhti was practically
excised from literary canons by the late nineteenth century, possibly due to the increasing regulation of
heteronormativity by colonial notions of morality, Banerji’s verse re-appropriates, adapts and transforms
the languages of Rekhti and the ghazal to fashion a contemporary lesbian/femme aesthetics.
In the poems “Madhur,” “mulaqat,” “rati” and “Mashuqa,” Banerji relies on the various sexual,
gender, cultural and linguistic ambiguities of the literary and performative traditions from which she
draws. As Vanita has pointed out in Queering India, the precise meanings of terms from the past to
describe same-sex desire “are highly debatable and cannot be fixed” (4). The grammars of sexuality,
eroticism and gender used in Rekhta and Rekhti poetry, as well as in other traditions of the ghazal, cannot
simply be framed within Eurocentric hetero/homo or male/female binaries. For this reason, these genres
can and have been claimed, alternately, as containing explicit celebrations of male-male or female-female
homoerotic desire; as ambiguously gendered, in order to disguise their homoerotic content; as patriarchal,
misogynist and heterosexist; as instances of cross-gender identification and performance; or as more
about other relations of power, such as class, caste, nationalism or religion, than about gender or sexuality
alone. In many ways, Banerji uses her contemporary queer perspective both to expose and recast the
polyvalent meanings and eroticisms of these earlier genres. As such, these poems open up alternative rereadings of South Asian sexual and gender histories, which have been obscured by essentialising colonial
and nationalist narratives of purity; in turn, situating Banerji’s poetry within these alternative sexual and
gender historicities opens up multi-layered readings of the poems themselves.
Likewise, Banerji’s diasporic lens – already suspicious of ‘originary’ stories that seek to lay claim
to a pure, authentic and singular national past – is brought into play in order to rediscover cultural forms
whose syncretisms have been over-written by the homogenising tendencies of rigid nineteenth-century
cultural, religious and linguistic binarisms. Although Banerji’s language imitates the poetics of earlier
genres, such as Rekhti, her ‘inauthentic’ reconstructions of such genres produce the awareness that these
cultural forms were themselves ‘mixed’ and 'remixed' and cannot be contained by colonial frameworks
that view art as simply either ‘original’ or ‘imitative’. Much like the work of a “spy, stealing treasures,”
or “the magic of alchemy” (“Mashuqa” 15), Banerji’s poetry recasts and re-appropriates the words and
artefacts of already hybrid, or ‘impure’, cultural forms, at once dissembling and reassembling these into
something new, something of one’s own making.
Moreover, the translative and transformative remakings of language that Banerji performs flow
simultaneously in different directions. The hybrid vocabularies of her queer diasporic perspective help to
newly imagine earlier dissident gender and sexual histories, just as much as these earlier erotic languages
could be understood as influencing, or forming the building blocks, of a contemporary queer diasporic
framework. In this sense, Banerji’s aesthetic resonates well with Shah’s ideas about the ways that South
Asian queer diasporic subjects have had to “invent themselves, often with new words and names of
identification,” precisely through approximating, resignifying or performing anew fragmented records of
personal and public history (141-2). Similarly, Banerji’s poetics constitutes both a reclamation of older
forms of erotic poetry and a new genre for writing queer diasporic subjectivity and desire.
Banerji’s ironic reconstruction of different traditions, mythologies and frameworks points to a
significant theme of Night Artillery itself: the very question of how genealogies may be constructed,
challenged, reclaimed or reconstituted by those bodies who are at once inside and outside many different
social traditions. Throughout her poetry, Banerji questions, and ultimately overturns, the foundational
PI/CB status that colonial, sexist, and heteronormative narratives of the Western imaginary must have to her life,
174 to her telling of history, and to her art. Instead, she locates other possible genealogies in which to place
her writing by crafting her aesthetics out of bits and pieces of multiple sources. The genealogies that
Banerji constructs for her art are characterised not by purity, but by hybridity – the spaces “between noon
and dusk, nuances of shade / lying between azure and turquoise” (“Raga Malkauns” 16). In this way,
Banerji holds on to different aspects of her self and her history, especially as these differences are so often
constructed as mutually exclusive or oppositional within dominant discourses. Banerji’s poetry shows
that queer identity does not have to entail an abandonment of South Asian cultural, religious, or aesthetic
traditions of identity, just as the poems also challenge the Eurocentric and racist assumption that the queer
body is primarily a white body.
The conscious construction of queerly South Asian diasporic cultural and literary genealogies is
perhaps one of the most important contributions that Night Artillery makes as a whole. For queer writers
of colour, Banerji’s work provides innovative models for addressing the question of how we might go
about claiming certain sorts of genealogies – whether linguistic, literary, historical or political – and how
we might think about situating ourselves within these. Speaking of the ways in which South Asian queers
are so often erased from dominant or official public records, Shah remarks that, because of this, we have
“enlisted history – personal, archeological, and social – to attain visibility and voice” (142). Accordingly,
in order to construct a queer South Asian diasporic identity, Banerji looks to a variety of conventional and
unconventional archival sources: family relations; myth; religious and cultural iconography; South and
West Asian poetics; contemporary postcolonial literatures; and everyday cultural or regional practices.
For example, Banerji draws genealogical linkages between the performances of her poetry and
various everyday regional, religious or cultural rituals, as she remakes these to reflect the gestures and
modalities of her own aesthetic practice. In “Shanti Jal,” Banerji implicitly compares the rituals of
poetry, or her “alphabet of tears” (10), to the Hindu ceremonial sprinkling and offering of peace water.
Similarly, in “Sleeping Rumour,” she metaphorically relates the marks left on the skin by a lover to the
decorative designs of alpana, or the regional/cultural practice of adorning the site of a festival or
ceremony common to the area of Bengal; she then links both of these to the ‘designs’ of her own writing.
This (re)modeling of specific cultural, literary, familial and mythic sites of experience is how Banerji
constructs queer, hybrid genealogies in which to situate the processes, forms and performances of her
writing; these, in turn, constitute particular locales of affectivity for her readers. As multiple metaphors
fold into each other throughout the pages of Night Artillery, it is impossible (and undesirable) to separate
‘the queer body’ from ‘the racialised body’, or diasporic longings from lesbian sexuality and sensuality.
This metaphorical remixing of ‘queer’ and ‘diaspora’ importantly functions to wrench each of
these terms away from their hegemonic uses – where (white) queers and (heteronormative) nations and/or
diasporas come to be supposed universal signifiers for all queers and all imaginings of nation/diaspora.
Alternatively, in Night Artillery, ‘queer’ and ‘diaspora’ are always involved with each other – and always
qualified by each other. As Puar has noted, a major innovation of queer diasporic work is that it brings
together the terms of queerness and of diaspora, critically reworking each of these in the process:
It is precisely through noting these terms as relations, rather than entities, that the
exposure of their limitations produces potentially illuminative interactions. This
interfacing of ‘queerness’ and ‘diaspora’ critiques the very terms they seek to
incorporate, and in which they are incorporated, forcing particular redefinitions of the
original terms. (407)
In Banerji’s poems, queer and diasporic desires importantly incorporate each other; indeed, they define,
become, transform and translate for each other. They are located, systemically and somatically, within
and through each other, and in and through a body that insists on maintaining both its multiplicity and
integrity amidst systems that refuse to ‘see’ it, or grant it a certain materiality.
'places without maps', bodies and desires yet to be placed or fixed
A queer diasporic perspective importantly interrupts nationalist models of identity and cultural
PI/CB production, as these are often disciplined through colonial ideologies of whiteness and heteronormativity.
175 Unlike nationalist frameworks, as well as multiculturalist approaches that reduce the expressive arts of
Othered Canadians to examples of either ‘sub-national cultures’ or ‘ethno-nationalisms’, an interpretive
lens that reads for registrations of queer diasporic subjectivity can illuminate certain affiliations of desire
which cannot be easily accommodated by nationalist or multiculturalist paradigms. In Night Artillery,
these affiliative networks of desire are demonstrative of what Rinaldo Walcott has described as an ethical
refusal to leave behind disruptive or “outer-national” (17) histories, memories, identifications and
political commitments that can challenge many of the foundational discourses of ‘Canadian-ness’ and
dominant constructions of identity. In turn, such political reconfigurations and praxes hold the potential
for materialising a variety of Othered, or invisibilised, subject positionings.
In her poetry, Banerji thus maps out a “private choreography” and an “unpublic heartbeat” (7), as
she says in the poem “I Have Your Body for Proof.” In other words, Banerji’s writing offers a language
of queer racialised desire that remains largely unintelligible if read solely within the representational
frameworks that visibilise mainstream (white) gay/lesbian identities and public cultures in Canada. In the
first poem of Night Artillery, called “the libra allegories,” the speaker describes herself as “craving to
speak a history of the borderless” (3), alluding to this desire/need for alternative linguistic practices for
materialising queer racialised desire. Addressing a lover, or perhaps even the reader directly, the speaker
of “the libra allegories” begins with a request: “startle me into breath,” because “your eyes and my tears
are places without maps” (3). The address not only figures the reader in the place of the lover, but also as
someone whose eyes/readings act as placeholders for critical, political and subjective worlds yet to be
imagined. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz
explains that cultural/artistic work by queers of colour not only details the expressions of already-formed
queer racialised subjects, but also operates to bring into being new subjects as this work is seen and
recognised by others who are situated in shared yet differential (often as of yet un-named) locations.
Hence, according to Muñoz, the engagement of queers of colour in performative and expressive art
contributes to the creation of new “queer counterpublics” (146) for minoritarian subjects. In turn, these
counterpublics open up the space of our political and expressive possibilities. Similarly, for Banerji’s
readers, Night Artillery has the profoundly political ability to startle us into new genres and lines of sight,
thought, language and desire around the question of what it might mean and feel to be ‘South Asian’,
‘Canadian’, and/or ‘queer’ – while refusing to properly assimilate into any one of these.
1
See Siobhan B. Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture; Anne
McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest; Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education
of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things; and Andrew Parker et al.’s Nationalisms and
Sexualities for excellent analyses of this point.
2
See, for example, Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler’s Queer Diasporas, as well as Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin
Manalansan’s Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. For work that examines the concept of queer
diasporas specifically within South Asian diasporic contexts, see Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and
South Asian Public Cultures and Jasbir K. Puar’s “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer
Diasporas.”
3
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In her book, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender, Himani Bannerji locates
present-day racial stereotypes, as well as current Canadian state policies around race and ethnicity, quite clearly within Canada’s
colonial-settler history; its colonial mythos of the French and English as the two ‘founding fathers’ or ‘originary’ nations of
Canadian history; and the racist taxonomical systems that are generated in order to justify, manage and, at the same time, erase a
colonial history of genocide and subjugation of Indigenous peoples on this land. Bannerji further argues that, in the context of
Canada’s colonial history, racial and class formation is dependent on gendered and sexualized ideologies. According to Bannerji,
old and new “colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery” are some of the main “conceptual
devices [for] the construction and ascription” of racial, classed and gendered identities and stereotypes in Canada (6). These
cultural discourses provide key sites where racial, classed and gendered systems of power intersect and interact in order to help
shape a nexus of state power through which nationhood, citizenship and political entitlement are legitimised, granted and/or
denied to subjects.
4
For example, J.M., one of Lee’s interviewees who identifies as a butch lesbian of mixed Cantonese background, describes the
ways in which her models for butch masculinity can be rendered invisible; to illustrate this, J.M. notes that activities such as
cooking and an orientation for family, although typically seen by white culture as ‘feminine’, constitute, for her, important links
between Asian masculinities and butch lesbian embodiment (124). In other instances, femme and non-butch/femme identified
interviewees explain how certain embodiments of hair, dress and expression (for example, having long hair or the wearing of
particular clothing or jewelry) are often mis-read as ‘heterosexual’ or hetero-feminine according to dominant frameworks that
visibilise white ‘lesbian’ identities in North America, even though these expressions may have more to do with their
identifications as ‘Asian’ or ‘South Asian’ than anything else (123, 127). In these ways, Lee’s interviewees speak of how
dominant white perceptions of ‘queerness’ often work to erase possibilities for ‘seeing’ or imagining queer racialised subjects,
genders and eroticisms. Many of Lee’s interviewees thus discuss the importance of recognising culturally-specific embodiments
of queerness, of refusing to conform to white middle-class norms of what ‘queer’ means or looks like, and of maintaining
personal, familial and political connections with the multiple communities in which they are situated.
5
For excellent analyses of the re-organisations of sexuality, particularly the criminalisation of homosexuality, that took place in
India under British colonial rule, see Ruth Vanita’s “Introduction” to Queering India; Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, in SameSex Love in India (194-201); and Suparna Bhaskaran’s essay, “The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal
Code.” For an examination of how colonialism and anti-colonial nationalisms interacted to produce important shifts in sexual
and gender ideologies in India, see Mrinalini Sinha’s “Nationalism and Respectable Sexuality.”
6
Banerji’s poetry can be usefully read in terms of Rekhta/Rekhti forms and conventions for a number of reasons. These include:
the particular linguistic continuum from which she draws; the content of her subject matter, which mimics the longings for a
beloved typical of the ghazal; the attention to bodily or corporeal language, especially female-female eroticism, as found in
Rekhti; and also through other allusions within the collection, such as the reference to “mir” in “bending toward exile” (45).
Here, “mir” likely refers to Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), often cited as one of the greatest Rekhta poets; in fact, he is often credited
with originating Rekhta and giving shape to the Urdu language itself. A noted characteristic of Mir’s poetry is male-male
homoerotic desire.
7
See C.M. Naim’s “Transvestic Words? The Rekhti in Urdu” for this description of the subject matter of Rekhti. For Naim,
however, the fact that most of the known Rekhti poets were males writing for a male audience, although in an “exaggerated
feminine voice,” is proof that Rekhti belongs to a masculinist and heterosexist tradition (22-23). See Ruth Vanita and Saleem
Kidwai’s discussion of Rekhti, in Same-Sex Love in India, for an alternative account of Rekhti poetry that pays specific attention
to Rekhti’s language of lesbian desire and eroticism, and various debates pertaining to the status of same-sex desire in Rekhti,
and its genderings of voice and address (191-94, 220-21). It is important to note that Naim gives little weight to claims about
Rekhti’s homoeroticism, nor does he seriously consider that Rekhti’s cross-gender identifications and performances could be
linked to queer masculinities and queer femininities. For an useful description of Rekhta’s linguistic histories, see also Shamsur
Rahman Faruqi’s “Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions: Urdu Poetry in the Eighteenth Century.”
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. "Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 12.4 (2006): 542-74.
Aguilar-San Juan, Karin. “Going Home: Enacting Justice in Queer Asian America” in Eng and Hom, 2540.
Alexander, M. Jacqui. “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and
State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy.” Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies,
Democratic Futures. Eds. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. New York:
Routledge, 1997. 63-100.
Banerji, Anurima. Night Artillery: Poems. Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2000.
Bannerji, Himani. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender.
Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2000.
PI/CB Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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Bhaskaran, Suparna. “The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code” in Vanita,
Queering India, 15-29.
Courtney, David. “Fundamentals of the Indian Rag (Raga).” Available at following website:
http://chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/raga.html. Accessed July 2005.
Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo and Martin Manalansan, eds. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife
of Colonialism. New York: New York UP, 2002.
Eng, David L., Judith Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz. “Introduction: What’s Queer About Queer
Studies Now?” Social Text 23.3-4.84-84 (Fall/Winter 2005): 1-17.
Eng, David L. and Alice Y. Hom, eds. Q&A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998.
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. “Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions: Urdu Poetry in the Eighteenth
Century.” Annual of Urdu Studies 14 (1999): 3-32.
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham:
Duke UP, 2005.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader.
Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 392-403.
Lee, JeeYeun. “Toward a Queer Korean American Diasporic History” in Eng and Hom, 185-209.
_____. “Why Suzie Wong Is Not a Lesbian: Asian and Asian American Lesbian and Bisexual Women
and Femme/Butch/Gender Identities.” Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
Anthology. Eds. Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason. New York: New York UP, 1996. 117-32.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 1998.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York:
Routledge, 1995.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1999.
Naim, C.M. “Transvestic Words? The Rekhti in Urdu.” The Annual of Urdu Studies 16 (2001): 3-24.
Patton, Cindy and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, eds. Queer Diasporas. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Parker, Andrew, et al., eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Philip, Marlene Nourbese. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown: Ragweed,
1989.
Puar, Jasbir K. “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer Diasporas” in
Eng and Hom, 405-22.
PI/CB Shah, Nayan. “Sexuality, Identity, and the Uses of History” in Eng and Hom, 141-56.
178
Sharma, Nandita. “Race, Class, Gender and the Making of Difference: The Social Organization of
‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada.” Atlantis 24.2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 5-15.
Sinha, Mrinalini. “Nationalism and Respectable Sexuality.” Forming and Reforming Identities. Eds.
Carol Siegel and Ann Kibbey. New York: New York UP, 1995.
Som, Chih-Lien, “Just once before I die I want someone to make love to me in Cantonese.” The Very
Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women. Ed.
Sharon Lim-Hing. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1994. 260-61.
Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American
Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Strongman, Roberto. “Syncretic Religion and Dissident Sexualities” in Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan,
176-92.
Vanita, Ruth, ed. Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. New
York: Routledge, 2002.
_____. “Introduction” in Vanita, Queering India, 1-15.
Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai, eds. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History.
New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
Walcott, Rinaldo. “Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging: The Politics of Representation in
Black Canadian Expressive Culture.” Canadian Review of American Studies 29.2 (1999): 1-24.
1
Crossing Borders to Perform Identity in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso
University of Málaga (Spain)
If one thinks that one sees a man dressed as a woman or
a woman dressed as a man, then one takes the first term
of each of those perceptions as the “reality” of gender:
the gender that is introduced through the simile lacks
“reality,” and is taken to constitute an illusory
appearance (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble).
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Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother
and she was adopted and raised by white parents in Glasgow. In Trumpet (1998), her
only novel to date, she tells a story that reflects like her poems and other writings her
interest in individuals whose lives cross conventional borders of nation, race or
gender and challenge the constraints of gendered, national and racialized conceptions
of identity. The half-black Scottish jazz performer Joss Moody is dead when the novel
begins and we only get to know him through the impressions of other characters, so
that the narrative creates an ensemble of voices that remember him as he was alive
(his wife, his son, a band musician) or capture their brief encounter with his
bewildering dead presence (the physician, the registrar, the mortician). With the
exception of his wife of forty years Millie, for whom he was just her beloved husband
(“I am the only one who can remember him the way he wanted to be remembered”
[40]), most characters in the novel are puzzled by Joss Moody, and similar concerns
about lying and truth resonate in their voices as they try to sound the depths of what
they sense has been a life of deceit.
Trumpet begins its narrative one month after the death of Joss Moody in 1997
and we first encounter him through the memories of his bereaved wife Millie. She is
hiding in their summer home in the remote Scottish village of Torr to escape the
flashes of photographers and the inquiries of reporters that have pursued her these
past weeks after the revelation that Britain’s legendary trumpet player was female.
Millie feels “hounded, hunted” (5) by journalists that keep splattering her image over
the papers and writing what she describes as lies and lurid headlines about her life
with the man that had been her husband since 1956:
One of the newspapers articles had the headline Living a lie. They found
people who claimed to be Joss’s friends who said things like, ‘He fooled us
completely’. But it didn’t feel like that. I didn’t feel like I was living a lie. It
felt like I was living a life. Hindsight is a lie (95).
We will later hear the voice of one of these journalists, Sophie Stone, a freelance
writer who is researching to write a popular biography of the musician that will show
how Josephine Moore became Joss Moody. Before she interviews any of the people
who knew him she has already shaped in her mind a story of duplicity and scandal
that will sell well, since “people are interested in weirdos, sex-changes, all that stuff”
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(125), and the possible titles she considers for the volume sound indeed like tabloid
headlines: The Trumpet Man/Woman, The Life and Times of the Transvestite Trumpet
Player, Now You See Her, Now You Don’t, The True Story of a Trumpet Transvestite,
Daddy, You Blew It, Blow that Thing (125).
Ventriloquism is a major force in Jackie Kay’s poetry and polyphony is at the
core of this novel that attempts to reproduce a musical effect, with the different
chapters speaking to each other and echoing ideas and phrases as they tell and retell
the same story from different perspectives. Kay has acknowledged the influence of
jazz and blues in her poetry and in her novel she creates “a multiple-voiced narrative
also, so that it would be like a piece of jazz, with several instruments having their solo
turns. I wanted to build a world in voices so that the reader too could make up Joss
from all those different pieces” (Encompass Culture).1 Trumpet tells the story of Joss
Moody through an array of characters that express their reactions to what for them
was a lie, the careful daily performance of masculinity by a biologically female
individual. Readers seeking in the novel the insider’s look into the feelings of Joss
Moody will be disappointed, since Trumpet gives voice to the people who were close
to him but only provides a brief glimpse of his mind in two chapters entitled “Music”
and “Last Word”, which give some facts about his family origins in Africa and
suggest that his music submerged him into gender-free moments of intense experience
(when “all his self collapses—his idiosyncrasies, his personality, his ego, his
sexuality, even, finally, his memory” [135]). Other than these momentary insights into
his music performance and his family memories, what intimate knowledge we gain
about Joss comes from the people who lived with him, that is his wife (who knew)
and his adopted son Colman (who did not know and resents it) and, despite their
extremely different reactions to the present situation, both convey a similar perception
of Joss as a man that relished his ordinary life as a husband and a father.
The starting point for Trumpet was the real-life story of the American jazz
musician Billy Tipton, who was discovered to be anatomically female after his death
in 1989. Kay has stated that she was fascinated by the story of this piano player who
lived as one person and died as another and whose adopted son was quoted as saying
“He’ll always be daddy to me”; her novel was initially inspired by her desire to
explore the son’s full acceptance of his father’s construction of identity and the
paradox of living as one person and dying as a different one.2 Trumpet was published
the same year as Diane Wood Middlebrook’s carefully researched biography of Billy
Tipton Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, the work of a literary scholar who
was approached for the task in 1991 by one of the musician’s former wives. Billy
1
The influence of jazz in her writing has been noticed by many readers, among them John McLeod,
who sees this transatlantic link as evidence of a vital transnationality at the heart of much contemporary
black writing in Britain: “A self-confessed fan of black American writing and music, and the author of
a book about Bessie Smith, Kay places the influence of black American popular culture at the heart of
her book’s structure … Kay’s novel is certainly structurally indebted to the patterns of American jazz
music translated into a literary aesthetic” (99-100). For a study of the stylistic influence of the blues,
rap, and jazz on the poetry of Jackie Kay and other Scottish women poets see Laura Severin, “Distant
Resonances: Contemporary Scottish Women Poets and African-American Music”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 39.1 (Mar 2006): 45-59.
2
Middlebrook’s biography of Billy Tipton records similar reactions among some of the people who
knew him well, including one of the wives who lived with him for seven years and was never aware
that Billy was anatomically female: “’I cannot in my wildest dreams accept the fact I finally know to be
true’, Betty wrote after her first long interview for this book …’I have never not admitted to sleeping
with, by, and enjoying the love that was! … I wish I could shout to the world how great Billy was as a
person, friend, confidant, and a love. Just cannot express the personality he was. As you can see, [Billy]
is still a he. Who is me—?’” (Middlebrook 175).
3
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Tipton was a white piano player that started his life as a man in the 1930s while
Jackie Kay’s character is a half-black and Scottish trumpet player that begins his
career in the 1950s, but the time frame is significant in both cases, since as Kay
herself has indicated in reference to her protagonist, Joss Moody would have had
other choices today and his transgender existence could have been different. Indeed,
as Middlebrook indicates, “[d]uring the years in which Billy’s style of music had been
going out of fashion in the entertainment business, gender had come into its own in art
and politics. The very term ‘gender’ was now a marker on the grave of venerable
assumptions about the importance of sex difference” (6-7). In the years following his
death Billy Tipton did become a popular emblem of transgender life: a group of
female jazz musicians in Seattle founded the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone
Quartet and he inspired the opera Billy (1995), the play Stevie Wants to Play the Blues
(1997) and the jazz musical The Slow Drag (1996).
Billy Tipton, née Dorothy Lucille Tipton in 1914, began cross-dressing when
(s)he was nineteen in Depression-era Oklahoma City to secure a job as a musician in
bands which would only accept male performers: “Dorothy apparently gained from
the brutal economic pressure of the early 1930s an enabling insight, namely, that
playing saxophone was not just playing an instrument, it was playing a role, for which
trousers were required” (Middlebrook 56-57). Billy Tipton left no diary and few of his
letters to family and friends have been preserved, so that we have very little access to
his thoughts and feelings. In his will, the last of at least five women who called
themselves Mrs Tipton was named executor of his estate, which amounted to little
more than his musical instruments when he died almost destitute in a trailer park in
Spokane, Washington. He was by then divorced but the youngest of the three sons he
had adopted with his last wife was taking care of him the morning in January 1989
when the medics were called in: “[They] lay Tipton on the floor of the trailer, squatted
over him, and opened his pajamas to feel for a heartbeat. One of them turned to
William and asked, ‘Son, did your father have a sex change?’ (Middlebrook 3). Two
days later he died in hospital and the autopsy report established that the body was that
of a normal biological female past menopause, a fact that came as a shock to the many
people who had been unaware that Billy was female, including those who lived close
to him like his wife and his three adopted sons.
Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of Billy Tipton makes clear that, apart
from the memories of those who knew him, there are no possible insights into Billy’s
mind other than what has been left of his performances as a musician and entertainer,
and she introduces several chapters with quotations from his comic routines, many of
them with the kind of innuendo about sexual identity that in retrospect makes them
resonate beyond the obvious humour his audiences perceived. Middlebrook starts her
narrative of Billy Tipton’s life from the undisputable premise that Billy was a woman
who played a role:
This is the story of a female jazz musician named Billy Tipton, who lived as
a man from the time she was nineteen until “he” died at age seventy-four and
was discovered to be female. Billy Tipton’s death in the provincial western
city of Spokane, Washington, made news all over the world, not because
Billy was a well-known musician but because the scale of the deception and
the scarcity of explanations endowed the skimpy available facts with an aura
of myth (xiii; emphasis added).
At later points in the book Middlebrook qualifies this sense that Billy was a woman
and describes her as occupying an undefinable space as someone who worked
4
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creatively in the gap between biology and gender. She states that if we were to use
terms available to us in contemporary thinking, we would see in Billy “someone who
fits the profile of the female-to-male transgenderist or female ‘gender blender’, that is,
a person with a female body but an indeterminate gender identity” (217), while she
insists that a significant question that will remain unanswered is whether Billy felt
like a man or like an actor.
If we compare Billy Tipton’s biography with Jackie Kay’s fictional recreation
of Joss Moody’s life we see that Kay’s novel is very much about transcending
traditional classifications. In her desire to explore “how fluid identity can be ... how
gender and race are categories that we try to fix” (Bold Type), she tells a story that
challenges the idea that man and woman are natural categories. Billy Tipton’s
biographer repeatedly uses terms like “deception” or “illusion of masculinity” since,
despite the occasional hint that there is a strong element of performance in gender
construction, Middlebrook’s narrative does not seriously question the fact that Tipton
was indeed a woman who lived a life of deception. On the other hand, Trumpet makes
no such assumptions about the links between biology and gender. Some characters
strongly feel that Joss’s masculine identity was a lie, a fraud that they resent because
it destabilises their naturalised conceptions of what is male and what is female, and
Colman’s initial reaction upon seeing his dead father configures his body into the
abject as that of a “freak”, a “pervert” or a “weirdo”. Colman’s anger at the
destabilisation of sexual categories is obvious: “My father had tits. My father didn’t
have a dick. My father had tits. My father had a pussy. My father didn’t have any
balls. How many people had fathers like mine?” (61). When Colman’s anger subsides,
however, he comes to the realization that he cannot remember Joss Moody as
anything else but a loving father. In the character of Millie the novel shows “Kay’s
emphasis on the power of love and partnership against the marginality and potentially
fetishized person Joss embodies as a transgendered, transsexual male” (Hairson 693).
Through Millie the novel argues that the enactment of gender identity maintained
through careful performance during a lifetime is proof enough that the person born as
Josephine Moore is indeed a man called Joss Moody. His wife was the only person
who shared his secret while he was alive (“It was our secret. That’s all it was … Our
secret was harmless. It did not hurt anybody” [10]) and she is profoundly hurt by the
newspaper stories that portray her as anything other than “an ordinary widow” (24).
Her pain for his loss is indeed compounded by people’s inability to treat her as they
would treat any other widow: “My husband died, I am now a widow. Why can they
not understand how ordinary that is?” (205). It clearly did not matter to Millie that
Joss was born with a woman’s body—she loved him as a man because that is what he
felt he was:
I look at the picture on the album cover, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t
see him as anything other than him, my Joss, my husband. It has always been
that way since the first day he told me … I remember the expression on his
face; the fear, that I would suddenly stop loving him. I remember covering
his mouth with my hand and then kissing it. But I don’t think that I ever
thought he was wrong. I don’t think so (35).
For most of the other characters in the novel gender is attached not only to
certain social patterns of behaviour and performance but crucially to certain biological
realities that leave no room for the physician, the mortician or the registrar to state
5
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anything other than the fact that Joss Moody was a woman.3 In his life Joss crossed
the conventional borders between male and female (or moved freely along the sexual
continuum) to perform a male identity with the physical attributes of masculinity in
his clothes, his walk, his mannerisms. The characters’ denial that Joss could be
anything else but a woman once his anatomy is revealed shows that gender identity is
still strongly attached to its usual bodily incarnation in our common perceptions, so
that a female body performing as a male individual is necessarily characterised as
deviant and a lie, and words like “lie” and “truth” to contrast the apparent two sides of
Joss’s life, as well as verbs such as “defend” and “justify” when trying to find answers
to his behaviour, are employed frequently not only by the fictional characters that are
shocked by the news, but also by readers trying to come to terms with the story in
Trumpet, including some supposedly enlightened readers well versed in contemporary
gender issues like Ceri Davies, who repeatedly uses the words “lie” and “deception”
to describe Joss’s life in an analysis of the novel that hopes to show “exactly how
Millie endeavours to manipulate the truth to deny her possible lesbianism” (5).
Jackie Kay wanted to write about love in quite an old-fashioned way (Jaggi
56) but her text argues against concepts of identity that restrict gender configurations
to what is socially acceptable or even nameable.4 The biographer’s perception that
Billy Tipton was enacting a deception coincides with what many of the characters in
the novel feel about Joss Moody, which is the common social perception that
intuitively most of us at some level share. As Judith Butler indicates, when we see
someone who is perceived to be cross-dressed, in this case a woman dressed as a man,
“the gender that is introduced through the simile lacks ‘reality’, and is taken to
constitute an illusory appearance” (xxii). Our general reaction when we see a crossdressed individual is to sense that there is, as Butler explains, an ostensible reality
coupled with an unreality and so “we think we know what the reality is, and take the
secondary appearance of gender to be mere artifice, play, falsehood, and illusion”
(xxii). Butler questions the legitimacy of such common responses: “what is the sense
of ‘gender reality’ that founds this perception in this way?” (xxii), a questioning that
Trumpet seems to embody in fictional form5 and which is explicitly presented in a
letter to the press included in one of the novel’s chapters:
We question this notion that somebody who lives their life as a man and is
discovered to be female at the time of death was really a woman all along.
What is ‘really’ in this context? What is the force of that reality?
Transvestites Anonymous Group (TAG) (159-60)
3
The power Joss Moody’s performed masculinity is such, however, that his dead presence can unsettle
some of these perceptions in the case of the funeral director: “All his working life he has assumed that
what made a man a man and a woman a woman was the differing sexual organs. Yet today, he had a
woman who persuaded him, even dead, that he was a man, once he had his clothes on” (115).
4
Many characters in the novel, for example, resort to the label “lesbian” to describe the relation
between Joss and Millie, but for her the term is totally inappropriate because they felt they were man
and wife.
5
The novel does not, however, lend itself to a straightforward analysis on Butler’s terms because, as
has been noticed by some readers, the ritualistic stylised dymension in Joss Moody’s daily enactment
of masculinity is indeed in line with Butler’s conception of performativity but “the novel in general …
supports the idea of a true identity to be discovered, uncovered or asserted in spite of everything”
(Williams 43).
6
There is a utopian element in the novel to the extent that it provides glimpses
of a world “in which people can be what they want to be, love whom they want to
love, and be remembered for the gifts they gave” (Hairston 694). As in her other
writings, Kay’s subtle investigation into the complexities of identity is informed by
her own life as a woman writer who is Scottish, black and a lesbian. Trumpet
illustrates her belief that identity is at a crossroads of nation, race, gender and
sexuality as it tells a story about moving across borders, not only the gender border
that Joss Moody crosses in his daily performance of masculinity, but also the
conventional borders of racial and national identities, with Africa and Scotland
converging in the character of Joss Moody, who is like the Glaswegian Jackie Kay
herself both black and Scottish.6 Trumpet stresses the importance of decision-making
and personal agency in the construction of gender and shows Kay’s concerns with
issues of choice in our self-definition as human beings as it explores the intricacies of
identities that cross generally accepted boundaries and are thus socially perceived as
problematic or disturbing.
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WORKS CITED
Bold Type Interview with Jackie Kay
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0499/kay/interview.html
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge, 1999 (1990).
Davies, Ceri. “’The Truth is a Thorny Issue’: Lesbian Denial in Jackie Kay’s
Trumpet”. Journal of International Women’s Studies 7.3 (March 2006): 5-16.
Encompass Culture: Jackie Kay
http://www.encompassculture.com/readerinresidence/authors/jackiekay/
Hairston, Alena. “Trumpet”. Callaloo 29.2 (Spring 2006): 691-94.
Jaggi, Maya. “Jackie Kay in Conversation”. Wasafiri 29 (Spring 1999): 53-56.
Kay, Jackie. Trumpet. London: Picador, 1998.
McCleod, John. “Fantasy Relationships: Black British Canons in a Transnational
World”. A Black British Canon? Ed. Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies.
Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. New York:
Virago, 1998.
Severin, Laura. “Interview with Jackie Kay”. Free Verse, Spring 2002
http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Spring_2002/Interviews/inter
views.htm
Williams, Patrick. “Significant Corporeality: Bodies and Identities in Jackie Kay’s
Fiction”. Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British
Literature. London: Hansib, 2005.
6
As Colman remembers, his father felt really at home only in Scotland (“’The minute I hit Carlisle, I
know I am in my own country. My heart starts beating the minute I cross the border’, his father would
say” 187]).
Butterfly’s Borders: Gender, Geography, Fantasy and Experience in David
Bateman’s Lotus Blossom Special
Larissa Lai
Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly begins with a mock marriage. This type of
marriage supposedly belongs to Japanese tradition, at least, in the imagination of the
librettist. The callous American sailor Pinkerton, eager for a temporary Japanese wife
marries the naïve, fifteen-year-old Butterfly in a contract that binds them for nine
hundred and ninety-nine years, “but with the option, at ev’ry month, to cancel the
contract.” Both are ecstatic at the union, but for Pinkerton, it is a frivolity, while for
Butterfly, in spite of her relatives’ admonitions, it is deadly serious. The opera’s tragedy
turns on the misunderstanding between play and reality. This is indicated in the very
opening of the opera, with Pinkerton and Goro observing the mobility of the walls of the
house in which Pinkerton and Butterfly are to be husband and wife. The walls and ceiling
“come and will go, just/ as it may suit your fancy.” Pinkerton calls the house a “fairy
dwelling,” which, Goro observes “Springs like a tow’r from nowhere.” Like the fairy
house, Butterfly, for Pinkerton, is a toy (“the age/ of playthings”) to play with until he
marries “a real wife from America.” To Butterfly, who, in the logic of the opera, inhabits
only the world of play, the marriage is serious and solemn. Those who live in fairyland
experience it as “real.” Tellingly, while showing Pinkerton her treasures, she throws
away her pot of carmine (the stuff of artifice) but keeps the very real dagger her father
used to commit suicide at the Mikado’s command some years prior.
The opera draws a frame around Butterfly, her house, and indeed, Japan itself. It
is self-aware, but it is not self-reflexive in the sense of seeing it’s imperialist
misrecognition of Asian women. It lays the error of reading at Butterfly’s feet. She can
not see who she is. Pinkerton might be callous, but because he is American (and real) and
she is Japanese (and therefore of the imagination), he cannot be expected to stay with her.
In the logic of the opera, Butterfly’s tragedy lies in her own misrecognition of both
herself and her lover.
Of course we, as good postcolonial readers think we know better. We understand
that Madama Butterfly is a racist, imperialist imagining of Asian femininity. In the
context of American imperialism in Asia, if one thinks of its military bases in the
Phillipines, or more pointedly Vietnam (which is what makes the newer rendition of the
opera, Miss Saigon, so appalling) the international political context in which the opera
circulates is racist and offensive. The right-on stance of contemporary race politics is to
read the opera as a bad Western race fantasy, and move on to produce other, better
representations. However, in recent years, as myself and others have discussed elsewhere,
the difficulty of producing “better representations” that do not get consumed in a newly
Orientalist way, has shown itself to be difficult if not impossible.
David Bateman’s performance piece Lotus Blossom Special, then, takes on a
slightly different strategy. He re-engages the narrative of the opera to show us something
about whiteness, masculinity, camp and queer sexuality. In so doing, he reveals that these
may in fact be the real subjects of the original opera, and not Asian femininity at all.
Puccini may have been more conscious of this than his audiences, if the framing is any
indication.
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Lotus Blossom Special begins, not with a mock marriage in an exotic locale, but
with a fantasy divorce in a banale (though unspecified) Canadian town. Bateman’s
framing is even more careful than that of the Puccini opera. We are given a little context
first—strains from Madama Butterfly including a bit of the recurring motif of the
American national anthem. Thus the interracial and international marriage is invoked.
But this is immediately followed by an instrumental version of Tammy Wynette’s D-I-VO-R-C-E and the first visuals of the piece, a series of slides with text from the opera and
images of both “Asian” and “American” women, in which both the gender and
nationality of the women are exaggerated and overdetermined to the point of obliterating
any other possible reading. Except, of course, a camp one.
The fifth slide provides a quote from Chuang-Tzu, that opens the floodgate for
intentional mis-interpretation, re-interpretation and recreation. It is Chuang-Tzu’s famous
butterfly quote: “All is an illusion. I don’t know whether I am a man, dreaming I am a
butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” In the context of the previous slides the
terms “butterfly” and “man” become not overdetermined categories at all, but rather wide
open windows through which anything could fly. The next slide takes immediate
transgendered advantage of the situation. The quote says: “All is an illusion. I don’t know
whether I have been a man, dreaming I am a woman, or a woman dreaming that I have
been a man.” It is attributed to “David Bateman, Ethnically Displaced Canadian
Performance Artist and Bewildered Nymphomaniac.” The qualifiers are necessary, since
there are many David Batemans in this show—He plays all the characters in the opera
except Pinkerton, who is given to us as a large, inert pink skeleton, and Cho-Cho San’s
child by Pinkerton, Trouble, who is played by a large, spooky-looking plastic doll.
It is in this open-ended landscape that the action of Lotus Blossom Special takes
place. Bateman, playing a performance version of himself, adorned in a black evening
gown, a high-collared Chinese-styled vest, and high heels narrates the divorce through a
campy rendition of Tammy Wynette’s D.I.V.O.R.C.E., now with lyrics. The marriage of
Cho-Cho San and Pinkerton is transposed to the melodramic divorce of David Bateman
from his closet case lover, the producer who is his absent interlocuter over the course of
the performance. This is not a real marriage either, but a self-consciously invented one,
located purely in the ironic imagination of the performance artist. The metaphoric layers
are multiple. One could read this divorce as the angst-ridden but still freeing divorce of
Butterfly from Pinkerton, or the liberating separation of Asian women from hegemonic
and racist representations of Asian women by Orientalist Western men. Or one could read
it more literally in Tammy Wynette’s terms as the divorce of a working class white
country girl from her cheatin’ lyin’ man, or even more literally as the melodramatic
abandonment of a much beloved object by the scorned lover, the producer and David
Bateman respectively. None of these readings escape quotation marks, and none of the
escape cultural overdetermination.
What is made present here, in an interesting way, is the performance artist’s
romance with and desire to inhabit the site of fantasy, the one in which he gets to have
the surly straight producer, or for that matter, any of the other men who figure as
temporary paramours in his narrative. While the politically liberated stance of progressive
Asian Canadian women is to refuse the trope of Butterfly as a racist stereotype, the
performance artist Bateman longs (in some measure at least) to occupy the site of fantasy
in precisely the way that the Butterfly of Puccini’s imagination does. He longs for the
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borders of the fairy house to extend from its place on a Nagasaki hill all the way to
America, so that Pinkerton can return, one fine day, without his American wife, to love
his fantasy wife again.
This longing in many ways begs the question of contemporary, liberated queer
politics that lobbies for the legitimation of gay marriage in the eyes of the law. What if
the real pleasure of queerness or gayness is its connection to camp—its occupation of a
fantasy world, marked by an uneasy tension between longing fantasy and its fulfillment.
If we recognize the second layer of the opera’s fantasy, which is its selfrecognition, as, in fact, white men’s imagining of Asian femininity, Bateman is permitted
to enter another fantasy space—the space of the socio-political. The opera purports to be
about the tragedy of Asian women’s longing for white men, when it is actually about
white men’s longing for Asian women. The opera projects white desire and fear on to the
bodies of Asian women. It makes the Asian woman the agent of that desire, when in fact
the desire is a Western patriarchal one. At some level, by framing Butterfly’s house as a
fairy house, as a house of fantasy, Puccini acknowledges this. For Bateman, as a white
man, to acknowledge this gives him a kind of power in the “real” world. The only
problem is that Bateman doesn’t identify with Pinkerton. He identifies with Butterfly.
Bateman is torn between the cultural power white masculinity bestows and his longing to
break away from into a fluttering world of fantasy. These are precisely the conditions that
send him reeling, willingly or not, into the world of camp.
If cultural overdetermination is the essence of camp, then there is no escape from
the artifice. But what if the artificial and the “natural” are not as opposed to one another
as early writing on camp suggests. (See Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”.) If David
Bateman’s work has a trademark, it is precisely in the eliding of the artificial and the
natural to push both himself and his audiences into taking a serious ethical position. The
tragedy of his work is that even that serious ethical position is artificial. Like Butterfly,
he cannot escape the stage, and suffers mortally because of it. Nietzche’s notion of the
mask might be useful here, to recognize that, while the multiple and escapable
artificialities that Bateman, as performer (and as person?) inhabits, in fact exist for all of
us. His performance of Butterfly only heightens the fact. The contradiction between
fantasy and fact is elided; “fact” is only another fantasy, in a layered series of fantasies
that never descends to essence. Depending on the distance and angle of vision, being
Butterfly can be a highly pleasurable or a highly abject position.
In the second act of the performance, we are taken on a journey across Canada, as
Bateman narrates an encounter between a younger version of himself and a married
British man travelling with his wife. The affair is illicit—conducted in the men’s room
and the bar car in a moving train, in moments stolen away from the man’s wife who
waits, unknowing, in the couple’s berth. The three of them ride the railway built earlier in
the century by Chinese railroad workers, excluded from the privileges of citizenship in
spite of their hard labour. Bateman acknowledges the workers through a campy sing song
of “I’ve been working on the railroad” and through a recounting of Canada’s anti-Asian
history. He names specifically the Japanese Canadian Internment during World War
Two, the exploitation of Chinese railway workers, the withholding of the vote from
Chinese people until the fifties, the media’s racialization of the SARS epidemic in
Toronto in the 90s, and for that matter, his mother’s infantilization of the Chinese man
who ran a restaurant in Peterborough while David was growing up. Both the affair and
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the racialized geography on which it occurs cannot be read by Bateman’s audiences as
sites of artifice in the way we might be able to read Puccini’s Japan and America.
Through the invocation of material history, we are called to recognize camp as deeper
and more complicated that postmodern pastiche. It is not life in the similacra; it is more
than pure artifice. If it is not possible to touch essence, we touch at least, a deeper layer in
the onion-like palimpsest of masks. Camp has become poignant. It is still funny, but its
humour is more Freudian than Jamesian. “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” masks the
history of Chinese railway workers. David’s identification with Butterfly masks the pain
of ephemeral encounters in which he is always a love object in passing and never the
eternal beloved of heterosexual romance. “I don’t like love,” he says. “It’s distracting, an
annoying social construct./ It sells greeting cards and flowers and sweets and tickets/ to
the symphony and the ballet and the opera!” The desire for love is precisely what propels
viewers to see things like Madama Butterfly in the first place, and internalize its bad
stereotypes! And yet, to live in the world of camp is to accept its duplicity: “Duped, since
childhood/ I liked being a little girl, in a little boy’s body/I never felt trapped in a man’s
body, I wanted both/ I still do… (31)” One may be biological and the other social, but
neither is more “real.”
The question that remains is how to understand the geographies of the
performance—the Japan and America of the Puccini opera, and the Canada of Bateman’s
performance. In a sense, they are all performance spaces—sites of fantasy, and yet real at
the same time. By throwing away the pot of carmine, Butterfly dissolves, for herself at
least, the distinction between sites of fantasy (Japan) and sites of “reality” (America). In
her newly adopted world view, it is possible for Pinkerton to return to her, right up until
the moment she is presented with the materiality of Pinkerton’s American wife. To
ensure that her lover does not become torn between herself and the wife, she must
maintain the correct boundaries between reality and fantasy. The only way she can do
this is by dying on her father’s suicide knife—which is a kind of magic object belonging
to both the “real” world and the world of fantasy. Through a “real” death, she the world
to order as Pinkerton imagines it—one in which she can never be his “real” wife, one in
which Japan remains a site of fantasy.
Bateman, on the other hand, as the butterfly in his performance, does not die. His
“straight” lovers are thus free to swing through the revolving doors of gender preference
with impunity, though they must deny it before they’ve drunk the magic bottle of
bourbon, that is, while they still live, repressed, on the heterosexual, “real” side of the
fence. His Canada then, is also a site of doubleness—both a nation state founded on racist
exclusions and a multicultural paradise in which such race and gender-bent performances
as Lotus Blossom Special can take place. It seems important to ask what this implies for
locations at which borders are drawn more vehemently—the border between Greek and
Turkish Cyprus, perhaps, or any barrier that prevents the free movement of people for the
purposes of love or labour. I suspect that the opposite sides of these barriers are equally
places of desire and disgust, sites at which fantasies of the other reach epic proportions
precisely because of the existence of the border itself.
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